Celebrity
Selena Gomez Got Cold Feet Before Releasing My Mind & Me
The actor explained why she tried to pull her 2022 documentary just weeks before it premiered.
Even celebrities get cold feet when it comes to life’s biggest moments. In her new Vanity Fair cover story, published on Sept. 9, Selena Gomez revealed that she tried to stop her 2022 documentary My Mind & Me from being released.
The film, helmed by Madonna: Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian, was meant to be a backstage look at Gomez’s 2016 Revival Tour. Instead, it ended up being a raw and candid document of her physical and mental health struggles, seeing her contend with the effects of lupus and her 2018 bipolar disorder diagnosis.
The actor-singer has always been open about her experiences, but got cold feet about getting very personal a few weeks before My Mind & Me premiered on Apple TV+ in November 2022. “I asked my team if it was possible to pull out,” she recalled. “Lawyers got involved, but we never took it to Apple because everything was locked.”
While the doc was received positively from fans and critics alike, Gomez initially blocked it all out. “When the movie came out, I didn’t look at anything for a few days, and then I was scared to leave the house,” she recalled.
Just days before the doc premiered, Gomez told Bustle that releasing My Mind & Me was a cathartic moment at the time. “I feel like I’m releasing, like I’m exhaling,” she said. “Like I was holding all of this stuff in, and it is super vulnerable, and I was just willing to just let it be. I don’t know why. It was kind of just a happy accident where I realized this was going to be much bigger than myself.”
Eventually, Gomez found comfort in her fans, who faced similar battles and shared their stories with her. “I just started to embrace it, and I felt like it was a really good thing,” she told VF. “However, I like to remind people that that is definitely nowhere close to where I am now. My mind was not right and chemically imbalanced, and it was really difficult.”
She also spoke about why she hated being referred to as a victim after people watched the doc. “That frustrates me, because being vulnerable is actually one of the strongest things you can do,” she said. “That narrative is not going to take over my life.”
