Selena Gomez on Emilia Pérez, Music, Wizards

Selena Gomez, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded 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 played the lead on the Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place and embarked on a pop music career that took her to the top of the charts. It all made Gomez one of the most famous people in the world. But as she entered adulthood, she was “craving” the opportunity to show that she had serious acting chops and to be part of high-quality projects that would call on her to use them. For a number of years, that dream seemed elusive. But in 2024, it came true.

Gomez is now 32, and this year she juggled three very different acting jobs. For her work on the third season of Only Murders in the Building, the Hulu comedy series on which she plays Mabel, a true-crime podcaster, and serves as an executive producer alongside Steve Martin and Martin Short, she received her third Emmy nom for producing — making her the most Emmy-nominated Latina producer ever — and her first for acting. For her portrayal of Jessi, the wife of a cartel leader who disappears 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 center of considerable 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 play the adult version of the character she played as a kid on — its Disney Channel spinoff/sequel Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.

Over the course of this episode, Gomez responds to questions from yours truly and from Chapoman students about her life and career. She discusses her path to the business and her experience of child stardom; the hurdles that she faced trying to transition to working as an adult; the biggest similarities and differences between acting and singing/songwriting, and why, over the past nine years, she has “shifted my focus” away from singing/songwriting and toward acting; how Only Murders and Wizards Beyond Waverly Place came about, and what she enjoys most about doing both; and, above all, why Emilia Pérez means so much to her.

Gomez shares that Audiard approached her about Emilia Pérez despite knowing her only from the 2012 film Spring Breakers. The granddaughter of Mexican immigrants to America, she admits she had reservations about playing a Spanish-speaking character, having lost the fluency that she once had (something about which she says she feels “guilt” and “shame”), but she says that Audiard assuaged her concerns by adjusting the script to reflect 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 songwriters, Camille and Clément Ducol, even replaced Jessi’s original big musical number (which, she describes as “so dirty”) with the ballad “Mi Camino” in order to reflect some of the thoughts and feelings that she expressed in the 2022 documentary feature Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me.

All of that, and the opportunity to work and spend time with her co-stars (they enjoy a “sisterhood” and have a group text chain), has made Emilia Pérez, for Gomez, a dream come true, a project she truly feels proud of and the start of an exciting new chapter of her career. “I can’t believe it,” she says of the response to the film and to her performance. “I feel very humbled, very overwhelmed — in a good way — and I hope that this is just the beginning. I can’t wait to do more and be in this world that I love so much.”