Selena Gomez is quickly becoming Hollywood's next big thing, rising to the ranks of superstardom just as fast as her seemingly overnight transition from tween star on hit Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place to pop idol.
"Disney is a machine," she says; "so people automatically assume that you can't work for the channel unless you act and sing and dance and sign up for all that. That's absolutely not true. I always did everything the way I wanted to do it."
Now, the 19-year-old (she turns 20 next month) is ready to move on from "teenybopper movies" to more challenging parts and even more adult-targeted roles. She's even looking the part of a more sexy and mature young woman in the July 2012 issue of ELLE magazine.
"I get offered the teenybopper movies, and I've done that. I haven't done a mega-hundred-billion-dollar Transformers movie, but that's not what I want to do either," she tells the magazine in her exclusive interview.
A recent Funny or Die.com video even featured Selena parodying adult novel "Fifty Shades Of Grey," taking on the sexually charged book in the spoof "Fifty Shades Of Blue," where she gets the hots for a less-than-desirable house painter.
She's also set to star alongside Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson in Spring Breakers, about a group of girls who rob a restaurant to fund their spring break trip. The girls get busted and bailed out by a drug dealer.
She's also got a 'duet' with the late star who she's named after and idolizes - Tejano singer Selena - in the works for a new tribute album.
"I made a bustier out of a bathing suit that I dyed black," she says of the first time she saw Jennifer Lopez in character as her idol, when she was five-years-old.
"I put glue and glitter all over it and I wouldn't take it off," she adds.
Among other things, Selena's first fragrance, "Mesmerize," was recently released; and she's also a budding fashion entrepreneur. And, of course, she's also the envy of millions of girls worldwide as the girlfriend of pop superstar Justin Bieber.
The "Baby" singer rented out Los Angeles' Staples Center last September to take Selena to a private screening of Titanic.
"If I'll share anything with you, it's that he really is a hopeless romantic. I had just mentioned it in the car - all I said is that I really want to see Titanic again, and then..."
Check out more of Selena in the July issue of ELLE magazine, on newsstands June 19.
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