“It’s either of two extremes,” she says. “Either you’re going to succumb to it and be surrounded by all the noise and enjoy it and get the rush from it, or you’re going to be so far off of it because you don’t trust anyone or think any of it’s genuine. That’s the girl that I am.”

Which brings us back to the time Diddy handed her his valet ticket.

“Look, I see all of it. I don’t care—I actually laughed hysterically when it happened. But I get it. I know what all of it is.”

She’s trying to think of her favorite David O. Russell movie. The one with Ben Stiller, she says. Talking about movies seems to have the same effect on Selena Gomez as a shot of espresso; she almost starts vibrating. She takes out her phone and scrolls through her library—she’s got like a hundred movies on her phone. She scrolls past Clueless and The Devil Wears Prada and Fight Club. Then she finds it—“Flirting with Disaster!”

One obstacle that remains, she says, is her face. It’s so round and Raphaelite that she might as well be peering out of the corner of the Sistine Madonna. “I’m young, and I look younger. I can play like I’m 16 still. Doesn’t really work for the things I want to do.”

We are talking in an empty room at a bowling alley. This is a fact of life for Selena Gomez, doing business in big empty rooms—I know this because it’s all we’ve been talking about for most of the week, prior to meeting up. Where could we go to have a conversation, unmolested? Ideas were floated: My hovel of a home. A whale-watching boat. The front seat of a moving vehicle. Ultimately, Selena Gomez decided the only tenable place for us to meet was here. Hollywood and Highland, center of Los Angeles, one of the most culturally vital cities in the history of global civilization, and we are in a bowling alley on a Friday afternoon, not bowling. It’s like we’ve been hermetically sealed inside a 16-year-old’s birthday party. We both have little bottles of water, as if to emphasize the colorless, tasteless force field around us. This is maybe what sensory-deprivation tanks are like.

She says she wishes they still made movies like Flirting with Disaster, which is a disturbingly rational thing for a 23-year-old to say about a movie made in 1996. She says she knows it’s an uphill climb from here, but if she could work with any director, it’d be Russell. Him or David Fincher, which feels meaningful, because Fincher is maybe the only director working right now who is (reportedly, at least) more demanding and intimidating than David O. Russell.

“I know he’s got a reputation for being intense,” she says of Russell.

I bring up a recent story about Amy Adams weeping on one of his sets. She knows the story better than I do, it turns out. It was on the set of—

“American Hustle,” Selena says, before I can finish the sentence.

Yeah. She said she cried every day.

“She said: Not every day, but most days,” Selena says, correcting me again.

What do you think it says about you that you read that story and you’re like, “Yeah, I need to work with that guy”?

“Because I saw her performance,” Gomez says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She looks so happy and so focused, saying this.

“There’s a deleted scene that’s not even in the movie that I think is her best scene that she’s ever done. It’s five minutes long, and it’s her hysterically crying and laughing at the same time, and it’s so beautiful. Because I know—I mean, I don’t know—but I know what maybe happened for her to get there. And it was fucking amazing. It was beautiful.”

Her hair is as glossy as a dolphin’s tail. She’s got on a snug neutral-color sweater that she’s sweating through—it’s evident, you can see the twin damp patches that people like Selena Gomez aren’t supposed to have. She keeps apologizing for it, which is heartbreaking, as if she needs to ask for permission to be human like the rest of us.

She’s already been in more than a dozen movies, some of them quite good—think of her in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, a film she’s immensely proud of, torn between God and James Franco—but she talks about her movie career as though it’s only now really beginning. One obstacle that remains, she says offhandedly, is her face. And it’s true. She looks like a child in a painting; her face is so round and Raphaelite that she might as well be peering skeptically out of the corner of the Sistine Madonna. It’s given her a lot in life, her face: She acknowledges that. But she’s also sort of done with it. “I’m young, and I look younger. So the roles that I want to go for, it’s all about how the face is. I can play like I’m 16 still. Doesn’t really work for the things I want to do.”

What are the things you want to do?

“I want to have an experience that I would go a little bit stir-crazy with. I like people pushing a little bit.”

Around this point, she excuses herself to use the bathroom and leaves her phone behind, and there’s something so trusting about that gesture, so simple and nonchalant, that I find myself thinking about it days later. It’s guileless in a way that’s almost frightening, and at the same time a kind of deeply considered “fuck you”—I dare you.

One lesson from Spring Breakers: A man will always end up with the credit. Many of the accolades for that film, and for Gomez’s performance in it, accrued to its director, Harmony Korine, chiefly for having the idea of casting Gomez in the first place. (“Harmony wanted an innocence because he thought it would be creepier,” Gomez said at the time. “I agree with him.”) Gomez was and is fine with this; she characterizes the exploitation on that film as “mutual”—Korine got her, but she got Korine, a deal she would do again if offered.

Other experiences have been less mutual. Part of her fatigue with celebrity is that, for a long time, much of hers was refracted—she was famous for dating Justin Bieber, or for having been a cog in the Disney machine. For years, she says, the gist of every interview she did would be about subjects other than, well, herself. Revival, which came out late last year, was meant to be an assertion of independence. (The first words Gomez sings are these: I feel like I’ve awakened lately / The chains around me are finally breaking.) It’s a solo record in the truest sense; Gomez invited only one featured guest, the rapper A$AP Rocky, who appears on *Revival’*s first single, “Good for You,” a breathy come-on of a song that hints at what makes Gomez most interesting artistically. This was a move straight out of the young-pop-star template that somehow managed to feel real, raw, even a little uncertain. She’s the ghost in the machine when it comes to this stuff: She takes the typical, scripted thing and makes it jarringly human.

In October, Gomez was on the cover of Billboard, and Rocky is quoted in the story as saying, well…

Did you read your Billboard profile?

“The one where I was on the cover? Yeah.”

Did you read Rocky’s quote in it?

Gomez looks puzzled. “What did he say?”

So I read her the quote: “ ‘She’s developing her sexiness,’ says the Harlem MC, who didn’t recognize Gomez when he heard the demo. ‘I don’t think she’s there 100 percent yet. She’s probably only fucked Justin Bieber, if that.’ He snickers. ‘But honestly, she wasn’t looking for a No. 1 hit. She did it to excommunicate herself from her image. That’s brave.’ ”