While singer The Weeknd has made a number of comedic cameos, his Simpsons cameo came with a surreal sci-fi twist that few fans could have predicted.
While The simpsons While not the first show to have The Weeknd poke fun at himself with a confident cameo, the season 33 guest star had a wild secret twist in store for viewers. The Simpsons have never been afraid to spoof celebrities, no matter how famous they may be. These parodies don’t always land, however, as evidenced by The Simpsons season 33’s misguided Joe Rogan parody.
It helps significantly if the celebrity guest star in question is involved in the joke. For example, season 33 of The Simpsons has already mocked guest star Beck Bennett’s SNL career, and now the long-running anarchic animated comedy has set its sights on another notable guest — and thankfully, he’s been a good sport about the gig. As a result, The Simpsons pulled out an undeniably original twist for The Weeknd’s comedic cameo on the show.
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In “Bart the Cool Kid” (Season 33, Episode 15), R&B superstar The Weeknd proved once again (after modest guest spots on “Uncut Gems” and “American Dad”) that he has sense about his fame and public persona for humor. The singer played the role of Orion Hughes, a TikTok rich kid adored by Bart’s generation. The Simpsons episode put a surreal genre twist on this Weeknd cameo, however, when a post-credits twist revealed Orion was his own father too. Rather than being a normal human, Orion was revealed to be a clone of his narcissistic superstar father – a character also played by The Weeknd, in a twist only viewers who listened very carefully could see coming.
The unexpected twist came at the end of an episode that was otherwise uncharacteristically grounded for Season 33, especially given some of the show’s recent appearances. The rest of Bart the Cool Kid featured nothing weirder than some disintegrating bootleg sneakers, which came as a surprise when season 33’s final Bart-centric Simpsons episode featured satanists, a Highland trail, and Martin Prince doing his Focusyn addiction used to outwit a pendulum booby trap. However, Bart the Cool Kid’s simpler story wasn’t necessarily a hindrance to the episode, which managed to tell a more solid story than most of The Simpsons Season 33 has done to date.
Still, the kinky revelation that Orion was his father’s clone was a solid way to up the Simpsons episode’s surrealism quotient while reinforcing the main theme — that despite their strained relationship, Homer and Bart have more in common than they like to admit. After The Simpsons Season 33 revisited previous storylines with Homer and Marge, the series was overdue for an episode that focused on the Simpsons patriarch and the family’s lonely son. As such, The Weeknd’s character, who is his own father, acted both as a left-wing shock and as a way of subtly reminding viewers that Bart and Homer’s troubled story continues The simpsons never stands in their way of being a family.
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About the author
Cathal Gunning (1361 articles published)
Cathal Gunning has been writing about film and television online since 2020. His obsessions include the Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series and the horror genre in general. He’s spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the Stranger Things writers, and he’s never seen a Star Wars.
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