Emilia Pérez director insists he was ‘completely unaware’ of Selena Gomez’s fame when he cast her

OHMYGOSSIP — Jacques Audiard was “completely unaware” of Selena Gomez’s social media fame when he cast her in ‘Emilia Pérez’.
The 72-year-old director is at the helm of the new musical crime comedy in which Selena – who is the most-followed woman on Instagram with 430 million followers – stars alongside Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Édgar Ramírez but insisted that he was “not familiar” with social media and was just keen to work with the world-famous actress.
He told Collider: “I was completely unaware of it. I’m not familiar at all with this social network, Instagram, TikTok generation. I have no access to all of that. I knew her from ‘Spring Breakers’ and the Woody Allen film she played in, [‘A Rainy Day in New York’].
“I just wanted to work with her for that. And when I met her in New York one morning in a cafe, I just knew instantly that I wanted to work with her.”
The movie – which premiered at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival – follows a woman asked to assist an escaped Mexican cartel leader undergo sex reassignment surgery to both evade the authorities and Jaques explained that his “intention” with the project all stemmed from a chapter of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute.
He said: “My intention, as I was saying, was about the transition identity, which was the chapter in the novel that gave me the idea for this film. I wanted the film to be set in Mexico, which I believe is a bit of a schizophrenic country, and these two elements, somehow the transition of Manitas Del Monte was Emilia Pérez, the change of gender was to be matched, in my opinion, with a change in the genre.
“Because I wanted it to be a soap opera and a musical comedy, a narcos film, something where you could not really grasp a label, something that was still very fluid. I really tried to do that in a film that was selected in Cannes, a drama that kept on changing and not being labeled.”

Source: IconInsider.com