“My grandmother said you never trust a dude with a rattail.”
In episode 3 of HBO’s The Idol, that sage wisdom is delivered by pop star Jocelyn’s co-manager Destiny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) after her client appears to have succumbed to the dark side of one Tedros Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye) and his singular, spindly, bad-vibes braid. (Indeed, the first episode of the series is called “Pop Tarts & Rat Tales,” which contains double entendres on several fronts.) The moment Jocelyn’s assistant Leia (Rachel Sennott) brushed Tedros off as “the rattail club guy,” they were already in his clutches. And so, too, were we.
After The Idol’s first episode aired, The Wall Street Journal suggested we might be headed towards a “rattail renaissance.” The search term “the weeknd rat tail” has 37.2 million views on TikTok. Tesfaye, who co-created the show with director Sam Levinson, was quick to clarify that the hairstyle was not meant to be hot; Tedros, as he told GQ, is meant to be “pathetic.” Even in its ‘80s heyday, the rattail was schlocky—so when a seedy nightclub owner like Tedros rocks one in a TV show set in the 2020s, it feels especially unsettling and anachronistic.
“The reality is, there’s nothing really mysterious or hypnotizing about him. And we did that on purpose with his look, his outfits, his hair—the guy’s a douchebag. You can tell he cares so much about what he looks like, and he thinks he looks good,” Tesfaye said. The hair, he added, “was a culmination of a few ideas, but it’s hard to give anyone credit for it. You’ll find out more about the rattail later on.”
“It’s been somewhat of a conversation piece,” agrees Emmy-winning hairstylist Chris Fulton, who headed up the show’s hair department during Levinson’s reshoots.” According to Fulton, the look came directly from Tesfaye, who arrived on set with a full conception of Tedros’s backstory and identity—including his hairstyle. “Abel had really, really specific ideas of who this guy was,” Fulton says. “Abel knew where this guy grew up, where he came from, where he spent time in jail.” From there, Fulton and Kim Kimble—Beyoncé’s longtime hairstylist, who also led the hair department on Levinson’s Euphoria—put their heads together to turn Tesfaye’s “chemically relaxed, hot-combed, pressed-out” vision into a wig.
“It happened in days. It literally was one of the fastest turnarounds that I've been involved in,” Fulton says. Initially, the Tedros wig was just a thin ponytail—that is, until Tesfaye’s personal hairstylist Kya Bilal took things a step further.
“It was just kind of one of those magical things that happens in film and TV where [Abel] was like, ‘What about a rattail?’ It started out as a ponytail, and then Kya braided it and it became a rattail. Everybody in the room was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’ It was just right.”
Funnily enough, a similar moment opens episode 2, when one of Tedros’s disciples Chloe (played by Red Rocket star Suzanna Son) tends to the braid.
“When Suzanna is braiding his hair, I just thought…she gives Manson girl meets The Shining, but beautiful, you know what I mean? To watch her sit and braid his hair was just so indicative of a modern day cult to me,” says Fulton. Many of the other rattail jokes that followed were improvised; others Levinson rewrote into the script in real time.
The slicked-out hair, Fulton says, “became kind of a really integral part of Abel’s character. I mean, he got that wig on and he was a completely different person.” A scene that will air later in the season was filmed during a real-life The Weeknd concert, during which Tesfaye “performed as The Weeknd and then came off stage, put the Tedros wig on, and shot. That's the kind of dedication that he had to this part.” Lest we forget that The Weeknd arrived on the scene with a signature hairstyle, even donning a wig resembling his former dreads to play a past version of himself in Uncut Gems.
That said, perhaps Tedros shares Tesfaye’s inclination towards transformation. “You will actually see a whole change in his hair as the show goes forward,” Fulton promises. Which means the rattail renaissance may yet portend an even wilder grooming craze.