Selena Gomez, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was enrolled in front of an audience of 500 students at Chapman University, has been an actress since she was 7 and a star since the age of 14, when she first carry outed the direct on the Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place and embarked on a pop music nurtureer that took her to the top of the charts. It all made Gomez one of the most commemorated people in the world. But as she accessed grown-uphood, she was “craving” the opportunity to show that she had solemn acting chops and to be part of high-quality projects that would call on her to engage them. For a number of years, that dream seemed elusive. But in 2024, it came real.
Gomez is now 32, and this year she juggled three very separateent acting jobs. For her labor on the third season of Only Murders in the Building, the Hulu comedy series on which she carry outs Mabel, a real-crime podcaster, and serves as an executive originater alengthyside Steve Martin and Martin Short, she getd her third Emmy nom for producing — making her the most Emmy-nominated Latina originater ever — and her first for acting. For her portrayal of Jessi, the wife of a cartel directer who disecombines in Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language movie musical Emilia Pérez, she and her co-stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Adriana Paz and Zoe Saldaña were jointly awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress prize and are now at the caccess of ponderable Oscar buzz. And the cherry on the cake? She also got to return to the world of Waverly Place as an EP of — and to carry out the grown-up version of the character she carry outed as a kid on — its Disney Channel spinoff/sequel Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
Over the course of this episode, Gomez reacts to inquires from yours truly and from Chapoman students about her life and nurtureer. She conversees her path to the business and her experience of child stardom; the hurdles that she faced trying to transition to laboring as an grown-up; the hugegest aenjoyities and separateences between acting and singing/songwriting, and why, over the past nine years, she has “shifted my caccess” away from singing/songwriting and toward acting; how Only Murders and Wizards Beyond Waverly Place came about, and what she endelights most about doing both; and, above all, why Emilia Pérez uncomardents so much to her.
Gomez splits that Audiard approached her about Emilia Pérez despite comprehending her only from the 2012 film Spring Breakers. The magnificentdaughter of Mexican immigrants to America, she accomprehendledges she had reservations about carry outing a Spanish-speaking character, having lost the fluency that she once had (someskinnyg about which she says she senses “guilt” and “shame”), but she says that Audiard assuaged her troubles by adfairing the script to mirror that Jessi spent time with family in America before marrying and moving to Mexico, and hence doesn’t speak perfect Spanish. And, she says, Audiard and his songauthorrs, Camille and Clément Ducol, even replaced Jessi’s innovative huge musical number (which, she depicts as “so gloomyy”) with the ballad “Mi Camino” in order to mirror some of the thoughts and senseings that she conveyed in the 2022 write downary feature Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me.
All of that, and the opportunity to labor and spfinish time with her co-stars (they endelight a “sisterhood” and have a group text chain), has made Emilia Pérez, for Gomez, a dream come real, a project she truly senses self-beginant of and the commence of an exciting novel chapter of her nurtureer. “I can’t consent it,” she says of the response to the film and to her carry outance. “I sense very unassumingd, very overwhelmed — in a excellent way — and I hope that this is fair the commencening. I can’t paengage to do more and be in this world that I adore so much.”
