The fansites are aflutter. Hollywood has a new starlet, and if your kids are fans of Hannah Montana or High School Musical, chances are they’re talking about her — or soon will be.
Selena Gomez, a dewy 16-year-old from Texas, is the star of the Disney Channel’s new movie, Princess Protection Programme. With cutesy good looks and a purity level to make Disney proud, she’s dubbed an angelic antidote to the more wayward Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus.
We speak as Gomez is filming another Disney Channel movie, a film version of her current Wizards of Waverley Place series. While she’s clearly media-trained, she is reassuringly teenage with it: “I’m super-blessed! I’m having a great time”.
Princess Protection Programme was particularly special, she says, because she starred alongside her best friend Demi Lovato. Gomez plays a shy tomboy who finds herself sharing her room with an exiled Princess (Lovato). “It didn’t really feel like work, more like a mini-vacation.”
Gomez landed her first film role aged 7, in Barney & Friends, and was rediscovered in a Disney Channel talent search. Five years on, she’s an emerging fashionista, making an unnervingly adult cover girl for Teen Vogue.
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She has also signed a record deal and her first album, is due for release in the autumn. She admits it’s a lot of pressure for someone her age, writing earnestly on her MySpace blog: “I’m going through change, growth and failure like everyone else . . . What I hope my fans learn from my journey is that you should not let anyone stop you from trying something you want to do.”
What does she want to do long-term? “I think acting is where I will probably end up. I would like to challenge a range of genres,” she says seriously. “I love Meryl Streep and Natalie Portman. I’ve never met them — I would probably have a heart attack if I did, ” she giggles.
She is determined to be a role model for her young fans and despite rumours of romantic links with young stars such as Nick Jonas and Taylor Lautner, she wears a purity ring engraved with “True Love Waits”.
Cyrus, meanwhile, lost favour with fans last year when she stripped off for a raunchy Vanity Fair shoot and perhaps feeling the competition, took a swipe at Gomez by posting a mocking video of her and Demi on YouTube (see tinyurl.com/ratknf; then tinyurl.com/ o948uh). But the smash box office ratings of the Hannah Montana movie last month proved she’s going nowhere.
“I’m not here to replace anyone,” Gomez says firmly. “Miley is such a sweetheart. There’s no feud, there’s nothing going on.”
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Could this starlet get any sweeter? Either Disney has done a terrific job of brain-washing Gomez or she was born to work for them.
Princess Protection Programme, Fri, Disney Channel, 6pm; DVD from June 22