The Weeknd has officially entered the stadium.
In advance of Sunday’s Super Bowl 2021, a second commercial dropped Tuesday to hype halftime headliner The Weeknd’s highly anticipated performance.
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, appears notably more subdued — and fully in-tact — after a string of face-altering appearances leading up to his big gig. The 30-year-old spent the past year or so in various degrees of deformity, from beat up and bandaged to fully plastered over with a CGI face-lift. It’s left many fans wondering what he’s got up his sleeve for this year’s performance.
But in the Pepsi commercial, which will air officially on CBS right before Super Bowl 2021 kickoff Sunday at 6:30 p.m. EST, The Weeknd takes an introspective walk through the tunnel of a football stadium.
As he walks through a montage of past music videos playing on the wall, a reflective voiceover narrates the journey leading up to the Super Bowl field, where a cheering stadium awaits him — though, in reality, the stadium in Tampa, Florida, is expected to only be filled to about a third of its usual capacity due to social-distancing precautions.
The voice is that of his lifelong friend and creative director La Mar Taylor, according to a Pepsi statement.
“What we create changes us. Every performance, a new chapter; every stage, a new beginning,” Taylor reads.
Pepsi, like many other Super Bowl advertisers, decided not to run any other commercials during this year’s game. Instead, the soda behemoth threw all their cash into this year’s 13-minute halftime show. The Weeknd also tossed millions of his own fortune into the performance.
“Abel spent almost $7 million of his own money beyond the already generous budgets to make this halftime show be what he envisioned,” his publicist told The Post.
No pressure or anything.
His commercial is among the early appearances leading up to the big game. On Monday, Frito-Lay released a light-hearted commercial with real-life husband and wife duo Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. But this year’s advertisers may not go as hard as usual — many are grappling with the right tone to take amid the tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic.
