25 August Selena, Steve Martin & Martin Short appears on the cover of Variety Magazine!

Selena Gomez, Steve Martin & Martin Short appears on the cover of September issue of Variety Magazine, as they talk about Only Murders In The Building and many more. Read the interview below and check out the photoshoot in a full quality in our photogallery at: gallery.armyofselenagomez.com

Im old!” moans Selena Gomez, on the verge of laughter. “I’m going to be 29 tomorrow!” Gomez is spending the day before her birthday needling her castmates Steve Martin and Martin Short on Zoom. Before launching into a conversation about their generation-gap comedy “Only Murders in the Building,” she is establishing just how grand the gap is. “Do you remember when you were 29, Steve?” Short asks.

“Another lifetime,” Martin muses in a tone that suggests a familiar rhythm has just clicked on.

“Wondering if the Jerrys were going to win the war,” Short continues, invoking the nickname used for Germans in both World Wars.

There are narrative twists aplenty — but what may hook viewers first are two generations of actors. Martin, in his first-ever series regular role, plays a legend-in-his-mind actor, while Short, a familiar presence on recent TV shows including “The Morning Show” and sketch series “Maya & Marty,” takes on the role of a theatrical director whose career has stalled after a flop. Both stars, collaborators in projects like “Father of the Bride” and their ongoing live comedy tour, remain adept at deflating their characters’ pretensions. And Gomez, who’s been growing her audience since her days on the Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place,” is stepping out in a big way, applying megastar hauteur to a character who conceals her vulnerability, and her challenging personal history, behind a tough and unknowable exterior.

The combination provides a few ways in for potential viewers. “Certainly, the show is a huge opportunity, given the breadth of talent,” says Craig Erwich, Hulu’s chief of originals. “You have comedy icons Steve Martin and Martin Short, and then you have truly one of the biggest social media presences in Selena Gomez. The audience for this thing is very wide.”

“I’ve played the show for people from my little sister to my grandparents, and they laugh when they need to laugh. They’re upset and confused when they need to be,” Gomez says. “It’s something that leaves you feeling intrigued, but not heavy and down and sad or stressed.”

The series serves both old- and new-school performers, combining a moody Manhattan tone with bleeding-edge concerns. The three leads, all true-crime junkies, end up collaborating on a podcast — also called “Only Murders in the Building” — to focus exclusively on crimes that take place where they live. They move in concentric circles around the case, growing closer in the process.

“I couldn’t understand that. And that led me to trying to learn what his life was — and all that I missed out on.” There are shades of this story in Gomez’s character, who has a mysterious connection to the departed. While solving a mystery can be rewarding, the series has a clear-eyed sense of the rupture murder causes.

“Only Murders” was produced this past winter and spring in New York City amid heightened safety concerns due to the pandemic. “Being in the city was really important,” Gomez says: “even though it was a ghost town.” Fogelman, who remained in Los Angeles as he worked on “This Is Us,” says, “We were testing hundreds of people every other day. We had numerous scares. It was a lot to deal with, but they did it really wonderfully, on time and on budget.”

For Gomez, “Only Murders” had meant a way to break away from homebound isolation; the star spent the early COVID era filming an at-home cooking series for HBO Max — one that relatably emphasized her ineptitude in the kitchen — before heading to New York. “I enjoy cooking and making people feel good,” she says. “But after I did a season of that, I was just eager to do something that was going to be interesting to me. I wasn’t going to take a risk on something I didn’t think was worth it.” Gomez’s “Selena + Chef” show had drawn energy from the chaos of remote production. “Obviously, I’m a klutz, and people enjoy that,” she says.

Gomez, who carries some of the story’s heaviest emotional beats, has the same let-it-go attitude. “I was exposed to people criticizing me as a child, and it was honestly unfair. The older I got, the more I realized that if I do something I really love, people watching will hopefully enjoy it.”

But she’s still trying to get the show in front of as many possible viewers as possible. One day, when the cast was asked to shoot a video for social media, Gomez says she made the actors ditch the script for the planned video in order to appear more casual. “I just did a selfie video where all of us were just being ourselves. That was my two cents I could put in,” says the young woman with some 248 million Instagram followers.

There are lessons in Gomez’s Instagram success for her co-stars — lessons that have nothing to do with social media. “You’ve remarked that when something looks planned,” Martin tells Gomez, “it doesn’t get as much attention as something that looks spontaneous and created right in the moment.” This axiom applies to streaming series as well; for all the work that went into creating the show during COVID, the minor-key notes of emotion that “Only Murders in the Building” hits feel human scale.

Source: variety.com