Her speaking voice is a famously soothing low hum. To say it’s unmistakable would be putting it mildly: You try going incognito sounding like Selena Gomez.

“Yeah, it doesn’t work,” she tells me. “Literally one time I was in line for something. I was fully in disguise, and I was talking to someone. I don’t even remember what I said. And then the woman in front of me goes, ‘My God, it is you! I thought I heard your voice!’ ” That was years ago. “I was like, oh God, what do I sound like to people? And then I also feel so silly once I get busted.”

Gomez has long since given up on wigs and hats as cloaking devices. In the 25 years since she debuted on Barney & Friends at the age of seven, she’s actually tried to let go of every kind of disguise and be the same person in public and private. It’s a gutsy endeavor for someone who, thanks to Instagram, has the slightly scary-sounding distinction of being the most followed woman on earth. For three years Gomez has been part of the delicious hit series Only Murders in the Building, and she’s just given the rawest performance of her career in the audacious movie musical Emilia Pérez. Gomez plays a Mexican drug lord’s terrified but wildly resourceful wife. When the movie hits theaters in November, her work will surprise the many, many people who didn’t know what a fiery actor she could be.

We first meet in Los Angeles at the makeup company she founded, Rare Beauty. It’s a slow, gray afternoon, but Rare Beauty is flush with positivity, from the product names (lipsticks in shades like Worthy and Strong, eye shadow sticks called Integrity and Well-Being) to the little slogans on the bathroom mirrors like, “Find comfort in being rare.” It’s all completely in earnest, and the company’s products are seriously good, as are the rewards: Rare Beauty is reportedly worth $2 billion.

Gomez’s office is bathed in white, pink, and red—it’s a bouquet of a space. When I come in, she’s surrounded by the smiling California team that keeps her carefully calibrated days as a movie star, TV star, pop star, beauty executive, and mental health advocate on track. There’s a laptop on her desk, a script for Emilia Pérez, and a list of questions for a famous friend she “met through Taylor,” whom she’s interviewing for something later. There are personal mementos too, like family photos and a note from her 11-year-old sister, Gracie. “She’s funny,” Gomez says warmly. She picks up the note and reads it out loud: “Hi, sissy, I love you so much. The next time I’m here, can we do each other’s makeup and make a ‘get ready with me’ TikTok?”

This moment totally tracks, Gomez’s friend and Emilia Pérez costar Zoe Saldaña tells me later. “I don’t fit well in circles where people only want to talk about themselves. Selena’s not like that,” she says. “She’ll show you 300 pictures of her little sister and parents and grandparents.”

When Gomez’s team files out, she settles on a couch the color of mulled wine. She looks cozy and hale in a denim Free People jumpsuit and Ugg slippers. Her skin is aglow, her hair voluminous. She is, like some other stars of her magnitude, much more slight in person, her features writ delicate. Gomez redid Rare Beauty’s offices last year and shared a carousel of photos with her 425 million followers on Instagram. At the time of our interview, she’s taking a break from the app but hasn’t announced it to her fans—the Selenators—because she has a habit of dramatically announcing social media breaks, then logging back on less than 24 hours later to post a selfie or leave a comment somewhere. It’s one of her more aggressively relatable habits, this inability to resist the apps after boldly saying she’s done with them. “I learned not to say that anymore,” she deadpans. Right now, she’s trying to quietly enjoy her time in the analog world. “I’ve been loving it,” she says calmly. “I’ve been working out. I’ve been taking care of myself. It’s the first time I’ve had a break in a little bit. So I feel good.”

There’s no shortage of things to feel good about. Gomez recently snagged an Emmy nomination for best actress in a comedy for Only Murders, her first-ever acting nod, despite working steadily for two decades. “I freaked out,” she says happily. “I went to dinner with my friends that night. Maybe [the voters] saw something in this past season that they hadn’t seen before.”

Gomez also became the most nominated Latina producer ever in the best comedy category, thanks to the series. She had no idea she was about to set a record. “When I heard that, I felt like I made my dad’s side of the family proud,” she says. “It was really cool to have that be a part of my story. I’m grateful for breaking barriers. Hopefully this is not a one-time thing.” Gomez’s father, Ricardo Joel Gomez, is Mexican American. He and her mother—the former actor Mandy Teefey, whom Gomez has credited with steering her through some daunting poverty early on and inspiring her career—named her after the Tejano icon Selena and raised her in Grand Prairie, Texas. “It’s empowering and it’s alleviating,” Saldaña says of seeing Gomez make history as a Latina. “When you meet her, you get the sense that she is owning her growth and owning her life and her voice. I’m grateful that our paths have crossed.”

The two of them met in Paris on the set of Emilia Pérez, a bold, heartfelt, and visually lush Spanish-language musical that’s about to have an eventful awards season of its own. The film was written and directed by Jacques Audiard. It stars Spanish actor Karla Sofía Gascón in the titular role, a brutal Mexican cartel leader who kidnaps a lawyer (Saldaña) to offer her a job: coordinating secret gender-confirmation surgery so the kingpin can transition and leave her old life behind. Gomez plays Jessi, Perez’s dormant volcano of a wife. She’s a lonely young woman and the mother of their two children who’s ferried from safe house to safe house in armored vehicles laden with security guards. As Emilia finds herself going down a different path in life, so does Jessi. She’s emboldened to break out of her shell—with all kinds of consequences.

Gomez calls Emilia Pérez a “fever dream,” but it’s not as wild a leap for her as it may appear. She’s long pursued supporting roles in unconventional, sometimes risqué work by auteurs, like Harmony Korine’s endlessly zeitgeist-y Spring Breakers or Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die. “That’s intentional,” she tells me. “I’d rather be a supporting role. I’d rather have four scenes in a Martin Scorsese film than be a lead in a movie about a tomboy that comes into her own and falls in love with the boy next door. Love those movies, totally watch those movies—but that’s not something I’m necessarily interested in.”

Audiard admits he was only faintly familiar with Gomez, having seen her in Spring Breakers and the Woody Allen film A Rainy Day in New York. But when she auditioned for Emilia Pérez, he knew very quickly that he wanted to hire her. As for Gascón, she was extremely familiar with Gomez, not least because she has a 13-year-old daughter who’s a superfan. “There’s something very special about her,” Gascón says of Gomez. Needless to say, her daughter was excited about the project: “She told me, ‘You better treat her well!’ ”

Gomez says she signed on to Emilia Pérez largely because of Gascón, who plays the drug lord both before her transition and after, pulling off a riveting dual performance. “She actually carried the whole film, and we followed her lead when it came to anything sensitive,” Gomez says. “She challenged me. In some of our scenes, she wasn’t afraid to get in my face. And I loved it because I had to match that energy.”

Both Gascón and Saldaña offered their services if Gomez ever needed help with the dialogue. The film is almost entirely in Spanish, and while they’re native speakers, Gomez herself is not. “Speaking it is not too terrible for me, but I’m not fluent. I would say that I’m okay.” She grew up speaking Spanish but lost fluency around the time she turned seven and that purple dinosaur came into her life: “I got my first job, and everything was English-dominated.”

The musical part of Emilia Pérez came easier. Gomez dove into the singing and the often intense choreography, which meant tapping back into her pop persona. “I can sing Spanish really well,” she says, having released several songs in Spanish, including the 2021 EP Revelación. She enjoyed recording the songs for this film, which were written by French singer and lyricist Camille with Clément Ducol, but wants fans to know she doesn’t have plans to release any new music of her own at the moment. “I don’t know if I’m ready, you know?” she says. “It’s a vulnerable space. Acting has always been my first love. Music is just a hobby that went out of control. Now it is a part of who I am, so I don’t think I’m going anywhere. I’m just not ready yet.”

She’s still keeping tabs on the pop landscape. Gomez got a kick out of Charli XCX’s Brat—particularly the bonus track, “Spring Breakers,” naturally—and she’s going to see shows whenever she can. “I love female artists,” she says. “I’ve been to all the girls’ concerts—Billie, Dua….” And of course, she can always pick up the phone and call Taylor Swift, a longtime friend. “She is really like a big sister to me,” she says. They talk about the industry from time to time, with Gomez seeking advice on music or how to navigate new friendships at their respective levels of fame. More often than not, though, they’re just gossiping about the things that all friends gossip about and comparing notes on the latest season of Vanderpump Rules. “I’m on The Valley now,” Gomez says, referring to the latest—and deeply haunted—spin-off of the Bravo reality series. “I’ve watched every episode of Vanderpump, so I don’t care if it’s bad!”

Whenever she is ready to record her own music again, Gomez also has a direct line to one of pop music’s most prolific producers: Benny Blanco. The two collaborated on the 2015 hit “Same Old Love” and the slinky 2019 track “I Can’t Get Enough,” featuring Tainy and J Balvin. In the music video for the latter song, Gomez wears silky pajamas and dances on an oversized bed; Blanco dances alongside her in a giant teddy bear suit. The two were just friends at the time, but things took a turn for the romantic in July 2023. At first, the pair were relatively low-key, but they’ve since elevated to full-tilt public adoration, sharing mushy Instagram photos and captions of one another. In his most recent public display of affection, Blanco shared a tender throwback photo of him and Gomez on the “I Can’t Get Enough” set: “i used to play a teddy bear in ur music video and now i get to b urs in real life….”

Though they’ve worked together for years, fans seemed surprised that the two were dating, partly because Gomez is laid-back while Blanco, who produced hits like Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” is a world-class yapper. Whatever the connection is—his brash, enthusiastic openness paired with her dry humor—it clearly works. “I’ve never been loved this way,” Gomez tells me. “He’s just been a light. A complete light in my life. He’s my best friend. I love telling him everything.” In May, Howard Stern told Blanco that he hoped the two of them would get married. “You and me both,” Blanco replied. Gomez smiles at the thought of Blanco saying it so bluntly and openly. “He can’t lie,” she says. “After the interview, I was dying laughing. Like, ‘Anything else you wanted to put out there?’ ”

Engagement rumors were flying as this story went to press, but to be clear, marriage isn’t an institution that Gomez ever wanted to rush into. Her mother gave birth to her when she was 16, and her parents were only married for a few years. “It was hard on me,” she says. “They were kids, so we were all growing up together.”

Even before she began dating Blanco, though, Gomez had a firm plan in place to start a family by the age of 35. “Before I met my boyfriend, I was single for five years, with the exception of going on a few dates,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, if this is the vibe, then what is the most important thing to me? Family.’ ” In the past Gomez has said she would be open to adopting children, partly inspired by the fact that her mother was adopted. If she hadn’t been, “I probably wouldn’t be here. I don’t know what her life would’ve been like. She and I are very thankful for how life played out.”

The theme of family pops up again and again during our conversation. Gomez is a godmother to her cousin Priscilla’s two children, so she gets a front-row seat to the wonderful and sometimes brutal experience of being a parent. “She keeps it real,” Gomez says of her cousin’s candor. She’s speaking excitedly about this, then briefly pauses. All this talk of motherhood: It’s reminding her of something that’s been weighing on her. “I haven’t ever said this,” she says, “but I unfortunately can’t carry my own children. I have a lot of medical issues that would put my life and the baby’s in jeopardy. That was something I had to grieve for a while.”

Gomez communicates this calmly and without sentimentality. “It’s not necessarily the way I envisioned it,” she says of becoming a parent one day. “I thought it would happen the way it happens for everyone. [But] I’m in a much better place with that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me. It made me really thankful for the other outlets for people who are dying to be moms. I’m one of those people. I’m excited for what that journey will look like, but it’ll look a little different. At the end of the day, I don’t care. It’ll be mine. It’ll be my baby.”

Her family isn’t pressuring her into marriage, by the way, nor is she pressuring Blanco. “We always make sure we’re protecting what we have, but there’s no rules,” she says. “I want him to always be himself. I always want to be myself.”

She means that in another way too: “I’m not changing my name no matter what. I am Selena Gomez. That’s it.”

Gomez has been managing not just her personal life in full public view for years, but her health as well—particularly since 2013, when she was diagnosed with lupus. She first spoke about her diagnosis in an interview with Billboard in 2015, sharing that she underwent chemotherapy to treat the chronic autoimmune illness, which causes the body’s immune system to attack healthy tissue and can cause inflammation and affect internal organs. Gomez was on her first solo tour, Stars Dance, when she was diagnosed, and had gotten through nearly 60 shows before she had to cancel the rest and get treatment.

In 2017 Gomez revealed on Instagram that she had gotten a kidney transplant, sharing a photo of herself and close friend actor Francia Raísa, who donated the vital organ. “There aren’t words to describe how I can possibly thank my beautiful friend Francia Raisa,” Gomez wrote in her caption. “She gave me the ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney to me. I am incredibly blessed. I love you so much sis.” The post was surprising and frank. It included photos of Gomez and Raísa on hospital beds holding hands, as well as close-ups of Gomez’s postsurgery scar. The news went viral to such an extent that people who couldn’t name a Selena Gomez album suddenly had thoughts about her kidney. Later, the news that Gomez and Raísa’s friendship had been badly fractured by hurt feelings went viral too—just one example of what it means to be the most followed woman in the world. Late last year the pair did the necessary repair work and are friends once more.

While Gomez was dealing with lupus, she was also contending with serious mental health struggles, which got a close-up in the shattering 2022 documentary My Mind & Me. The movie—directed by Alek Keshishian, who made the legendary Madonna: Truth or Dare—was originally meant to be a fun, artful way to capture Gomez’s 2016 Revival tour, but it quickly morphed as she began struggling with panic attacks, anxiety, and debilitating depression. “At one point, she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be alive right now,’ ” her former assistant, Theresa Marie Mingus, says in the documentary. “ ‘I don’t want to live.’ It was one of those moments where you look in her eyes and there’s nothing there. It was just pitch black.”

Gomez later attributed the devastation to the side effects of lupus. Shortly thereafter she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well. The tour was canceled, but her mental health did not improve and she suffered a breakdown in 2018. My Mind & Me is such a revealing document of pain that Gomez says she got cold feet a few weeks before it was set to be released. “I asked my team if it was possible to pull out,” she tells me. “Lawyers got involved, but we never took it to Apple because everything was locked.… When the movie came out, I didn’t look at anything for a few days, and then I was scared to leave the house.” She was paralyzed by the thought of the movie being out in the world but found her footing again, partly because fans facing similar battles shared their stories with her. “I just started to embrace it,” she says, “and I felt like it was a really good thing.”

“However,” she continues, determined to add a postscript, “I like to remind people that that is definitely nowhere close to where I am now. My mind was not right and chemically imbalanced, and it was really difficult. People were calling me a victim. That frustrates me, because being vulnerable is actually one of the strongest things you can do. That narrative is not going to take over my life. I’m grateful every day. And I have my days like everyone else, but I’m no victim. I just survived a lot. There isn’t a part of me that wants anyone to feel sorry for me.”

Gomez is still on a journey with her mental health but now has tools and protocols to take care of herself. She loves using temperature as a healing mechanism and finds cold water or space heaters to be soothing at different times. She’ll also do a mental exercise that’s hugely helpful: “I remind myself that I’m okay. I ground myself for a moment. ‘Where am I? I’m sitting down in the office. Everybody that I love is out there. There’s food. I can get something to eat. I can take a nap here before I leave.’ I put myself into the present.”

“I’m ready for it all—it’s just now I’m properly medicated,” she adds with a laugh.

Gomez donates a portion of sales from all Rare Beauty products to the Rare Impact Fund, a philanthropic hub that aims to raise $100 million for organizations dedicated to educating young people around the world about mental health and getting them services. The fund has raised $15 million since its launch. “Only around 2 percent of global health funding has historically gone to mental health,” says Elyse Cohen, the president of the fund and an executive vice president of Rare Beauty. “And currently just about 0.5 percent of philanthropic funding is given to mental health. When you think about the prevalence of this issue and how low the mobilization of funding is, there’s just such a severe gap. For us, it’s really about making a difference in the space.”

“I know it seems impossible,” Gomez says of the staggering $100 million goal, “but it’s important to me because it’s a crisis. There are a lot of people from every part of the world dealing with so much who are not properly educated on it and don’t know where to go. I want it to be accessible. There’s Planned Parenthood—that’s a resource for women. I wish we had a version of that for mental health. It would be so powerful if someone was—not to be too heavy but—to try to take their life and then decided to go to a Planned Parenthood [type of facility] that was free. I have big dreams for what I would like to see.”

The next time I speak to Gomez, it’s at the tail end of July, just after her 32nd birthday and her dual Emmy nods. She’s preparing for life to get intense again, with promotion duties for both Emilia Pérez and the upcoming season of Only Murders in the Building. The Emmy-winning series is now on its fourth season on Hulu, but the unlikely trio of amateur murder sleuths—Steve Martin and Martin Short as overly dramatic older men and Gomez as their sarcastic young neighbor—remain supernaturally funny. Short has said he was nervous about meeting Gomez, expecting an unapproachable diva. Instead, he and Martin met a disarming woman excited to work with them and able to hold her own in their esteemed company.

I talked to Martin and Short about Gomez on a joint Zoom call, and if you’ve never seen Only Murders, this will give you a pretty good idea of the vibe.

“I thought she was very smart,” says Martin. “I hadn’t really seen her act. I didn’t know her shows. But, you know, Marty and I tend to overact, that’s kind of our comedic style—”

“Hold on, hold on!” Short says, interrupting.

“I meant that as a compliment,” Martin replies.

“Oh, I see. Keep going,” Short says.

“Somebody else might think, Oh, I have to compete with that, so I better be really, really funny too,” Martin continues. “But she didn’t go there in any way. Her point in the triangle was perfectly leveled. She is really good. Her energy and tone—”

“What do you think when it comes to me?” Short says.

On and on they go, shooting jokes back and forth.

Gomez laughs when I tell her about the conversation later. “It’s a blast, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s like the show! They’ve changed my life and perspective on tons of things.” She’s become comfortable getting in on the jokes, butting in to land some punch lines of her own. “Marty and I have a riff we just do naturally, which is to deeply insult each other,” Martin says. “Selena was very polite for the first year, and then the second year she started to get into it and give as good as she got.”

Gomez is particularly excited about the fourth season because of the show’s meta quality. It follows the trio from New York to Los Angeles after a Hollywood executive decides to turn their story into a film. (Eva Longoria plays Selena’s character, Mabel, to hilarious effect.) The fourth season also sees the return of Meryl Streep as Loretta, a working actor who is starting to make a name for herself.

It’s funny to think that—though Gomez is far younger than her costars—she’s already an industry veteran herself, having worked for 25 years. Only Murders feels like the balancing force she needed after forging through the last few years in particular. She clearly feels balanced in other ways too, which allows her to handle all the work required to be everything she is. “It’s as simple as this,” she tells me. “I don’t want people to ever think I’m not grateful for what I have.”

Hair by Orlando Pita. Makeup by Hung Vanngo. Manicure by Tom Bachik. Tailors, Hasmik Kourinian and Susie Kourinian. Set design by Robert Doran. Produced on location by Viewfinders. For details, go to VF.com/credits.