Selena Gomez has given a brief insight into the early days of her career, telling The New York Times that she experienced bullying while working under the Disney umbrella.
When Gomez sat down to chat about her executive producer role on Thirteen Reasons Why, the new Netflix series based on Jay Asher’s teen novel of the same name, she said “I think [Asher] understood that I knew what it meant to be bullied.
“I went to the biggest high school in the world, which is the Disney Channel.“And my mom had a lot of history dealing with [bullying]. I heard her stories growing up. She’s very open about it.”
Thirteen Reasons Why tells the story of a teen who took her own life through 13 tape-recorded messages. Gomez says she was drawn to the project as early as age 15, and it “organically began to become a project that I knew I would be behind the scenes with.”
She did have some positive recollections of working at Disney, though. While addressing her recent and highly-publicised Instagram sabbaticals, Gomez said her time working on Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place was “when I was the happiest.”
Gomez granted that recollection may have been influenced by the lack of a social media culture at the time, saying “when I was on Wizards of Waverly Place, we didn’t have social media really. Twitter had just begun…
“Then, as I got older, I watched it go from zero to a hundred. So I’m actually glad it took us this long to create [Thirteen Reasons Why] because it’s so relevant now.”
You can read the entire interview, in which she also speaks about negative Instagram commenters (Gomez says “it’s like they want to cut to your soul”) right here.
Thirteen Reasons Why drops on the streaming service on Friday March 31, and stars Aussie newcomer Katherine Langford in the leading role.
Photo: C Flanigan / Getty.
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