Revisiting Euphoria director Sam Levinson's red flags as The Idol gets accused of 'torture porn'

Right from its first announcement last year, The Idol’s hype was obvious. After all, Euphoria’s creator and director Sam Levinson was collaborating with Lily Rose Depp and R&B star The Weeknd. “Torture porn” and “a waste of money”, that’s how the highly-anticipated HBO series The Idol is being described now. 

What’s wrong with The Idol? 

While The Weeknd has had small appearances in movies earlier, the show was supposed to mark his full-fledged acting debut as a leading man. Now, even non-hardcore Weeknd fans know how graphic sexuality plays an essential role in his lyricism and discography. And going by Euphoria, Levinson loves framing scenes where the actors bare it all.

So, it was no surprise then that The Idol, which would delve into the sleazy side of the music industry, would also not shy away from excessive nudity. 

But going by 13 anonymous crew members who recently talked to Rolling Stone, Levinson has gone overboard with the self-indulgence this time, reducing his upcoming series to a display of torture porn. The production staff also talked about how the set was chaotic and tense and multiple rewrites and production delays might make it not worth the money (the budget cost $54-75 million in the initial stages). 

But nobody cares about Rolling Stone? 

In a move that can be described as "savage" by some netizens, The Weeknd just uploaded a clip from The Idol where he discusses how irrelevant Rolling Stone is. Even the Instagram and Twitter post read, "Rolling Stone, did we upset you?"

Levinson wasn’t even meant to direct it

Amy Seimetz, who co-created and directed the drama series The Girlfriend Experience, was initially hired by HBO to direct The Idol. But Levinson took her place when she left production in April 2022. American media reports suggest that Seimetz’s initial plan was to highlight the “female perspective” while narrating the tale of an aspiring popstar (Depp) falling in love with an ominous self-help guru (Weeknd). 

But…it was The Weeknd and Levinson who took issue with this direction and ended up making major changes to the narrative. 

So, what did Levinson change? 

The new scenes under Levinson’s direction reportedly didn’t just get more sexually explicit but more along the lines of sexual assault. A scene that was scrapped mid-production involved Weeknd’s character inserting an egg in Depp’s character’s vagina, telling her that he wouldn’t “rape” her if she cracked the egg. And why was the scene scrapped? Because of the team’s ethical concerns? No, because the crew couldn’t figure out a method to preserve the egg in the scene!

To directly quote one of the unnamed crew members in the Rolling Stone report, 

What’s the other side of the story? 

Neither Levinson nor HBO have issued any statements in response to the whole debacle. At the moment, HBO is eyeing a June release date for The Idol even though it’s uncertain in what exact stage of production the series currently is, given the expensive reshoots, last-minute rewrites, and the production delays. 

As for Lily-Rose Depp, the nepo-daughter of Johnny Depp, the actress seems to have more admiration for Levinson. Calling him the best director that she’s worked with, Depp told IndieWire that never has she felt more supported in a creative space and that Levinson valued her input and opinions. 

Sam Levinson’s past red flags

While The Weeknd’s “f**k boi” anthems might send off some red flags, he’s respected as a well-mannered celebrity behind his music. Levinson similarly has some collaborators who can back him up despite his chaotic work ethic. Not just Depp, even his Euphoria leads Zendaya and Hunter Schaffer are on cordial terms with him. 

But Levinson’s style of excessive nudity has often been criticised by observers as an artistic choice that meanders towards fetishising the female body and now, torture porn. Euphoria, like many other intense teen dramas, was heavy on the sex but some viewers were uncomfortable with Sydney Sweeney’s character Cassie being overly sexualised, be it through her costume choices or the camera angles. 

In fact, on a lighter note, Euphoria’s sophomore season spawned several memes and satirical tweets through which audiences mocked Levinson as a creep who was just intent on seeing Cassie’s cleavage. While Sweeney has no bad blood with Levinson, even she told media outlets that some of her character’s topless scenes were cut from Season 2 as she felt Levinson’s choices of Cassie being nude were “unnecessary”. 

Not just Euphoria; even Levinson’s feature film work is riddled with such issues.

So, when Levinson directed the stylish and ultraviolet thriller Assassination Nation in 2018, the movie itself opened with trigger warnings around sexual violence, death, bullying, drugs, and “fragile male egos”. It was a bold work that delved into the blood-stained exploits of a group of teenage girls.

While some critics did see the movie as a “girl power statement” (albeit from a male director’s perspective), LA Times’s Kate Walsh was not that generous. She criticised Levinson’s choice of stylising sexual violence and called the film “a patronising lecture on the contradictory social conditioning of women as some kind of grrrl power rallying cry”.

It seems like Levinson was indeed hurt by these comments as in his next film, the dialogue-driven Netflix drama Malcolm & Marie, he made his hero vent out his frustration. Starring Euphoria’s Zendaya and John David Washington, the story depicts one night in the life of a toxic couple on the brink of collapsing. Washington plays a director who rants about how a certain “white female critic” was condescending to the gratuitous nature of his work. Obviously, Levinson has denied any comparisons with Walsh but the white female critic hardly seems like a coincidental choice. 

Obviously, the racial identities complicate the matter. Levinson is a white Hollywood nepo-baby, the son of Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson. Washington’s character Malcolm, on the other hand, is a black director trying to spring out of just the category of “radical black male directors” that “a white female critic” might tend to put him into. Needless to say, the audiences were puzzled at what message was Levinson trying to convey. 

Regardless of his past controversies and The Idol’s on-set chaos, the series is expected to be a big hit for HBO if it finally releases. Not only are the two leads worth of generating hype, even the supporting cast is star-studded with Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy and pop singer Troye Sivan. 

At the same time, The Idol can be (to quote one of the crew members who talked to Rolling Stone), 

“It was, let’s just say, a s*itshow.”