Selena Gomez on the Boundary-Pushing ‘Emilia Pérez’: ‘Just the Beginning of What I Feel I Can Do’
On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
Selena Gomez is aware you may not believe her, but the Emmy nominee is still working on establishing herself as an actress.
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“I know that I’m going to have to still fight for roles that I want,” Gomez told IndieWire. “There’s still a lot of barriers in my way. … People are like, ‘You must be getting so many calls [for jobs],’ and I’m not! I don’t think that’s how it works, at least for me. I still am proving myself in this field, especially at this degree.”
At least a few of those barriers are sure to be gone soon, once people see her electric, exuberant performance as Jessi Del Monte in Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez.” The multi-hyphenate loves a zigzag, from her music career to “Spring Breakers” to “Selena + Chef” to now working with a French auteur in a film that was the talk of Cannes. (Gomez, alongside her co-stars, won Best Actress at the film festival in the spring.) The Netflix movie is an Oscar contender, but months later even the star struggles to categorize it.
“The biggest thing I try to tell people is the best way to experience this movie is to not really know anything, because when you say ‘drug cartel,’ and when you say ‘transformation,’ and when you see ‘Spanish,’ all of this stuff, I just feel like people look at me and go, ‘What did you make?'” Gomez said with a laugh. “It’s crazy to explain.”
We’ll try, briefly: “Emilia Pérez,” a daring Spanish-language musical, follows Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón), who we first meet as a male-presenting notorious drug kingpin. Manitas then has secret gender-confirmation surgery, with help from lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana), emerging as her true self, Emilia (also Gascón). With new understanding, she then works to make amends to the victims of Mexico’s drug wars. Gomez portrays Manitas’ wife, who is kept in the dark post-transition, to disastrous ends.
“I found it extremely groundbreaking,” Gomez said. “I thought it was thought-provoking, visceral; it felt like something I’ve never seen before.”
Needless to say, it’s probably not what audiences expected from Gomez. But Gomez’s gift is spotlighting work that her massive fan base (she remains the no. 1 most-followed woman on Instagram) may not have sought out on their own. Plus, the opportunity to work with Audiard (“Rust and Bone”) was an intoxicating one.
“Jacques is really wonderful at directing in general, but he’s really good at directing women, [because] he’s so sensitive; he just wants everyone to feel good about what we’re all doing together,” she explained. “So he genuinely was very patient with us. … He’s not fluent in English, but he said something really interesting: He just loves the melody of how someone says a line. So he can direct us through how we are portraying it, even though he know[s] what we’re saying, he doesn’t know how to say what we’re saying, but he knows what we’re saying; he’s able to convey how our faces react and the melody of the way we are speaking. I’ve never quite been directed that way. He’s fascinating.”
Jessi was originally written as a harder character, but Gomez’s natural softness became baked into the idea, with songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille reworking her big number, “Mi Camino,” after Gomez was cast. Audiard told the songwriters to watch Gomez’s acclaimed 2022 documentary “My Mind & Me,” about her health struggles. The song, with translated lyrics like “I want to love myself / Love myself fully / Love myself just as I am,” was built up from there. (Thematically, it mashes up pretty damn well with Gomez’s own hit, “Lose You to Love Me.”)
Another number, “Bienvenida,” allowed Gomez to cut loose and unleash the kind of anger and fuck it energy viewers don’t often see from her onscreen.
“Shooting ‘Bienvenida,’ with the bed and the soundstage where it would disappear, was really beautiful and liberating,” Gomez said. “That was a very proud day for me, because it was a whole day just doing that number over and over again. And when you’re done, Jacques is always so animated, and he gets so excited when he feels like he got it.”
The role demanded a lot from her emotionally, but also practically: She had to refamiliarize herself with Spanish in her few months of prep. “It was really fun, because I can understand it better than I speak it,” she said. “It’s in there! I hope it’s not the last thing I do in Spanish, because it was really quite a challenge in a good way.”
“Emilia Pérez” also allowed Gomez to continue her current career hot streak (she recently snagged an Emmy nom for her work on Hulu’s hit “Only Murders in the Building”). The last few months on the awards circuit have been its own special thrill for the performer, who has been acting since she was a kid. Especially coming off a difficult personal time, she’s treasuring this moment: “It’s funny, because since I’ve released the documentary, so many wonderful things have happened, and it is actually a proud moment I was able to share that with people, but to know I’m on the other side, and to feel really good, it’s nice, you know? It’s nice that it’s different now.”
As to the future, Gomez has gotten clearer about what she does and doesn’t want.
“I commend people who can do a lot of sci-fi. I tell this to Zoe all the time. I think it’s so impressive, I just could never do it, because I’d be so bad at it. They would say, ‘Look at a tennis ball.’ I’d be like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to be feeling when I look at this tennis ball?,'” she laughed. “To me, that seems really scary.”
Broadway?
“I think I would be more interested to do a play [rather than a musical], just because I would exhaust my voice, because I’m not very good at conserving,” she explained. “I’d want to give my 100 percent the first time, and then they’d be like, ‘You have to do it 90 more times!’ I saw Scarlett Johansson in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ and it was really beautiful. I remember thinking, ‘This is something I would be interested in one day.'”
For now, one of the appeals of acting is the teamwork. Gomez points out that with singing, yes, others help make an album, but once it’s released the pressure is all on you. “I loved being able to do music, but in acting, you need an amazing film director. You need a great DP, great writer, great grip, everybody has to be like a family,” she said. “I feel like I get to spend time with this family, whoever it may be, and you get to create something beautiful together. Those kind of moments feed my soul. I feel so good, I feel normal. I feel a part of a team. It’s not all about me, and that is such a high for me.”
It’s no wonder she wants to do more of it.
‘I just think ‘Emilia’ has cracked the door open a little for me,” Gomez said. “And this is just the beginning of what I feel I can do.”
“Emilia Pérez” is now streaming on Netflix.
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