Everything eventually came “Naturally.” Selena Gomez opened up to W magazine in a detailed new cover story about her painful transition from Disney darling to adulthood, which was accompanied by heartbreak and a supposed feud.
“Once Disney was over, I was like: Oh, s–t,” Gomez, 23, recalled. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I had to learn to be myself.”
Part of that experience was firing her mother, Mandy Teefey, as her manager in April 2014. “I was like, ‘Mom, I gotta figure it out on my own,'” Gomez shared with the mag. At the time, the Texas native lived with her mom, stepdad and newborn half-sister, and subsequently packed her bags and moved to L.A. “It was the kid-going-to-college moment in my mind,” Gomez said of relocating, which proved to be the right move for her career.
Gomez had a standout cameo in the Oscar-nominated flick The Big Short in 2015, and has upcoming roles in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and an indie movie called The Fundamentals of Caring. “I know that I can go into a room and convince someone that I can be a character,” Gomez told W. “I’ll cut my hair, I’ll shave it, I’ll dye it. I’d go there in order for people to let Selena go.”
The actress further clarified whether she and Cyrus, 23, had a contentious relationship. “We never feuded,” Gomez noted. “We both liked the same guy when we were 16. It was just a Hilary Duff–Lindsay Lohan thing: ‘Oh, my God, we like the same boy!’ We are now completely settled in our own lives.”
Then, there’s also Gomez’s most-famous ex, Justin Bieber. Her on-again, off-again, three-year relationship with the Purpose crooner ended for good in 2014, but there’s still immense interest in the entity known as Jelena. “At first I didn’t care,” Gomez said of the constant chatter about their relationship. “To me it was: I’m 18, I have a boyfriend, we look cute together, we like that.”
The moment it changed? “Then I got my heart broken and I cared. Because people had no idea what was going on, but everywhere it was a million different things. I was kind of in a corner, banging my head against the wall. I didn’t know where to go,” she explained.
She and the superstar now remain friendly, but she’s really sick of that same old love. “I’m so exhausted,” Gomez told W about discussing Bieber. “I honestly am so done. I care about his health and well-being. But I can’t do it anymore.”
