Super Bowl Halftime Show: What Is the Story Behind The Weeknd’s Bloody and Bandaged Face

As The Weeknd takes the stage Sunday for the Super Bowl LV halftime show, fans who have been following his After Hours era are wondering what exactly he will look like. Surrounding the release of his most recent album, the “Blinding Lights” artist has been embracing a bloody aesthetic, appearing with a bloodied face and nose bandage on Saturday Night Live and the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards before upping the ante in November at the American Music Awards, where he appeared with a completely bandaged face and head.

Last month, he ditched the bandages for prosthetics, wearing elaborate prosthetics that seem to be satirizing Hollywood’s propensity for plastic surgery. “The significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated,” he told Yahoo News on Wednesday.

The “Can’t Feel My Face” singer also explained to Esquire last year that the bloodied look had a tie into the darker themes of his Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit single “Blinding Lights.” The Weeknd said that the song is about “how you want to see someone at night, and you’re intoxicated, and you’re driving to this person and you’re just blinded by streetlights, but nothing could stop you from trying to go see that person, because you’re so lonely. I don’t want to ever promote drunk driving, but that’s what the dark undertone is.”

This year’s halftime show is guaranteed to have some kind of artistic vision, with the Canadian-born singer even putting up $7 million extra from his own pocket above and beyond usual production costs to “make this halftime show be what he envisioned.” The artist and his team, including managers Wassim “Sal” Slaiby and Amir “Cash” Esmailian and XO’s creative director La Mar C. Taylor, teased the high production value of the halftime show to Billboard in a new interview. The Weeknd and his team “always had the Super Bowl on our bucket list,” Esmailian said. “We’ve always had timelines for all of our goals. It came a few years earlier than we expected.”

Despite only one-third of the Raymond James Stadium in the Tampa, Florida being filled amid the coronavirus pandemic, The Weeknd said he would be making sure the show was one for the ages. “We’ve been really focusing on dialling in on the fans at home and making performances a cinematic experience, and we want to do that with the Super Bowl,” he said. You can watch the Super Bowl and halftime show free online this year here. Disclosure: PopCulture is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.