REBEL YELL
From Disney queen to Harmony Korine, Selena Gomez is, irrevocably, all grown up.
Selena Gomez wants to meet at a Panera Bread-like chain near her home in a mini-mall strewn Los Angeles suburb. Her publicist warned me she’s “timely”—no surprise for someone who’s built a megabrand like Selena Gomez®. At the counter, I find myself telling a teenaged cashier with a plastic name tag that I have a meeting with “Ms. Gomez,” no pseudonym, and she directs me to a surreal sight in the corner: a standard-issue table appointed with a plastic sign that says “reserved.”
All around, Lululemon-clad moms are hunched over high-capacity bowls of kale salad. I busy myself with an 18-ounce chai and a platter-sized cookie when Gomez arrives, four minutes early, inconspicuous from the neck down in neutral cotton basics, luminescent and starlet-eyed up top. At a nearby table, an awkward pubescent type kills time on his laptop, flipping between social media sites. Couldn’t just one tweet be enough to summon TMZ? I’m paranoid, she’s unfazed. “I think they’re over me because I’m so boring,” she says reassuringly. “I get to Topanga Mall, and they’re like, ‘Why is she back at the same place?’”
Yet the obsessives are out there: 13,752,503 Twitter followers and 37,823,451 Facebook fans as of press time, not to mention the masses behind the five million or so singles that were downloaded from Selena Gomez and The Scene’s 2011 album, When the Sun Goes Down. There are also the tens of thousands of Kmart shoppers who layer on uniforms from her Dream Out Loud collection (priced from $5 to $24). Today, on message, Gomez is wearing the brand’s olive cargo pants. “These are $14.99,” she recites, as if each of the line’s 75 SKUs has been committed to memory. She pairs them with an equally basic waffle-knit cotton thermal and oversize scarf—the kind of artfully tossed-together ensemble that any fashion-conscious girl would wear to lunch.
It’s been six years since Gomez, then a 15-year-old, catapulted from Grand Prairie, Texas, to Hollywood instafame, thanks to her Disney series, Wizards of Waverly Place, which only went off the air last January. Now, months away from her 21st birthday, the teen icon is orchestrating a dramatic revision of her G-rated image with Harmony Korine’s neon-tinged slasher flick, Spring Breakers.
To say the least, the hypercolor film stills of bikini-clad starlets on scooters don’t quite prepare viewers for the ultraviolence, nudity, and moral depravity they’re about to encounter. “I wrote [Spring Breakers] at a motel during spring break about two years ago,” says Korine. “People fucking on my doorstep, blasting Taylor Swift, vomiting on my terrace, hanging from chandeliers…it was pretty nuts.” He developed a plot around four university co-eds (Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and the director’s wife, Rachel Korine), who pine for this rite of passage so badly that they steal a car and hold up a diner to fund their trip to Florida. Further shenanigans ensue, until a stint in jail thrusts them into the orbit of an obvious sleazeball called “Alien” (James Franco), who slowly reveals himself as a bloodthirsty, TEC-9-fellating drug dealer. “The girls did such a good job of falling in love with objects,” says Gomez. “They weren’t just seeing [Alien]—they were seeing his bed and guns and shine and money, and all those things represent a certain evil. At least that’s what I believe.”
During production in St. Petersburg, Florida, Korine enlisted real spring breakers as extras, and in the film’s opening sequence, they frolic under an unforgiving sun and a fine spray of beer, bare-breasted and bumping to the wub-wub pounding of Skrillex. “I don’t think I’ve even had a spring break,” Gomez says. But making the film allowed her to experience it vicariously, “doing things that I would get so much hate and in trouble for,” like underage drinking, felony narcotics possession, and grand theft auto. “I had to have someone show me how to hold the cigarette,” says Gomez. “Harmony was like, ‘It’s good that you don’t know. Maybe that’s a character trait.’”
How did the Disney star wind up in such a family-unfriendly film? Gomez credits her 36-year-old mom, Mandy Cornett, who fell in love with the Korine-scripted Kids. When it came out in 1995, Cornett was 19, Gomez was three. “She actually gets embarrassed, because she doesn’t want everyone to think she’s a bad mom, but she’s super artsy,” Gomez says. So when Korine’s camp approached her about a role in Spring Breakers, Team Sel jumped at the opportunity to read the script. “I kind of didn’t understand it at first, because it was a little bit raunchy,” she admits. “But then I saw some of his work, and I was in love with it. I thought, ‘This would be really cool for me to do. It’s super indie.’”
It’s tough to picture the squeaky-clean singer of “A Year Without Rain” swooning in the darkness while watching Korine’s 2009 film Trash Humpers, which depicts little more than masked derelicts feigning sex with trash bags and bins. I mention that she and I are probably the only two people who watched the whole film. “In the world!” she says. (Sorry, Harmony.)
From the beginning, Korine had his eyes fixed on Gomez as someone who could’ve played any of the four female characters in the film. Seemingly minutes after he made this known, Gomez, with her mother in tow, was auditioning in his living room. “I was like, ‘Huh? What the fuck?’” recalls Korine, betraying a mild apprehension about having them in his home. “I have some crazy artwork and stuff, and we kind of like, flipped it over, ’cause I didn’t know if they were really religious.”
“It was my first audition in years,” says Gomez, who found herself drawn to the character of Faith, a devout Christian looking for escape and transcendence—the film’s approximation of a moral center. “I definitely felt that with my first stepping-out role, I should choose something that I could understand a little more. I was really nervous, but Harmony took a chance with me. He said, ‘You live in this bubble, and I’m going to take you out of it, but you have to trust me.’”
It’s safe to say that after audiences see, or even read about, the movie, Gomez’s carefully crafted image will never be the same. The press has already been following the film’s production paparazzi-style, fueled no doubt by a multitude of scenes shot out and about in St. Petersburg last March. “There were different issues that I never had to deal with on any other movies,” says Korine. “The crowds of people—like thousands carrying signs and stuff, standing behind the camera—or news helicopters flying into the shot, or autograph freaks running onto the set.”
The question, of course, is how these people who follow Gomez’s every move will react to the final cut. “I’ve told parents, ‘Make sure you don’t let your kids see Spring Breakers,’ because with the title, you could think it would be cute or something,” she says. “I know it isn’t for the younger generation I have following me, but I’m also about to be 21. I felt like it was my little side project that I was super excited about, that would be under the radar.”
Not so much. At the Toronto Film Festival premiere, Gomez recalls, the front two rows were filled with teenagers. “And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how did they let these people in?’ I was freaking out, literally sinking in my seat. And they laughed when they needed to laugh, they were freaked out, they were scared, they were applauding. They understood it, you know? That’s when I realized, ‘OK, I must not be giving them as much credit as I should.’”
Surprising, considering that Gomez is savvy beyond her years. “I don’t know how a person gets to be like that at that age,” says Korine. “You hear about young starlets being so problematic, but Selena’s really together. She has a very strong work ethic, and she was really willing to experiment and play. She was very much into trying to invent her future.”
Which means refocusing her energies. The first project she’s likely to drop? Selena Gomez and The Scene, which will release its fourth record and embark on a world tour this spring. “I’m kind of viewing this as my last tour,” she admits. “Of course, I could change my mind, but I think I’ll eventually stop and shift to studio acting.” She pauses. “If I start doing things because I want to stay relevant or I want people to like me, then I’m just going to be miserable.”
For now, Gomez is still living at home with her mother and stepfather, but she does have a separate entrance to her wing of the house. “Maybe next year, or the year after, I’ll get my own place, but I’m still too nervous,” she admits. She also relies on a close group of girlfriends, including a certain multi-platinum American sweetheart, Taylor Swift. “We both experienced the same things at the same time,” she says. “But we’ve never once talked about our industry. She just became the person I’d go to for an issue with my family or boyfriend. It’s so hard to trust girls, so I’m lucky to have her.”
As of press time, it seems like her megawatt relationship with Justin Bieber is on-again—“I’m having fun,” she says coyly of her relationship status—but for the latest updates, please consult your smartphone. “It blows my mind that somebody wakes up every morning and goes to their little office and meets with people to just make stuff up,” says Gomez of her endless and oft-imaginative press coverage. She shrugs it off, refraining from reading the blogs “unless it’s really bad and I need to know.” But surely it’s comforting to date someone who knows the drill. “At the end of the day, love is such a normal thing, and everyone deals with it. Just because it’s a different lifestyle doesn’t change the meaning of what I’ve been raised on, which is fairy tales.”
Which is exactly what Spring Breakers is not. “I hope there’s only going forward for her,” says Korine. “She has the chops to be a really great actress, if she only gets bolder and bolder. Then, her career could really be something amazing. She needs to keep doing shit that freaks people out.”