Selena Gomez says she applies for acting roles namelessly due to typecasting
Gomez began her career as a child actor on children’s TV show Barney And Friends, before moving into music.
Actor and singer Selena Gomez has said she no longer gives her name when applying for film and TV roles due to being typecast in her pop star character.
The 32-year-old said she was “almost done” with music and said she wanted to focus on acting, describing it as “the field that I originally wanted to be in” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Gomez began her career as a child actor on children’s TV show Barney And Friends and Disney Channel sitcom Wizards Of Waverly Place, before moving into music with the pop rock band Selena Gomez And The Scene.
She went on to enjoy a solo career which has seen her amass five UK top 10 singles and one UK top 10 album.
During her time in music, Gomez continued to appear in films including Spring Breakers (2013), The Dead Don’t Die (2019) and Rudderless (2014).
Speaking about wanting to do more acting, Gomez told the US outlet: “Music will always be in my soul, but I never really got to spend enough time in the field that I originally wanted to be in.
“And I’ve been very strategic and trying my hardest to pick projects that are going to be compelling and not necessarily what people would envision me doing. That’s something I get a high off of.”
She said she did not want to do projects which would be seen as “obvious” and said being typecast had been “the biggest challenge that I’ve faced as an actor” and saw her rejected for being “too young” and for being well-known.
The Texas-born star added: “I’ll sometimes send in a tape when they don’t know it’s me, or if it’s in person, my managers will just say, ‘oh, we have a client that’ll have a read’, and most of the time, they’ll go, ‘OK’.
“And it worked on one of the movies I did, because they looked at me as I walked in and I thought I’d lost it immediately because they went, ‘ooohh’, I was like, no, no, no, no, just let me read’.
“It was Fundamentals Of Caring, a cute little movie, and it worked, I got it. You kind of have to do the dance.”
The Lose You To Love Me singer explained that the film industry wanted to see her in “very similar” roles to the ones she has previously played, which she said were “soft spoken” and “underdog” characters.
She said: “I love those movies, but I have goals of wanting to work with specific people, people on my dream board, and so whenever those opportunities arise, I’ll put myself in that room, no matter what it takes.”
Gomez said directors Aaron Sorkin and Martin Scorsese were at the top of her list of people she wanted to work with adding that she did not “need to be the star”.
The star said she had “done just as much as I wanted to do in music”, and was asked what she meant by the comments, to which she replied: “Almost done. Music isn’t going away. I just set it down for a second.”
