Selena Gomez and more | Here Comes the Sun

Welcome, I'm Tracy Smith and this is Here Comes the Sun, a closer look at some of the people, places and things we bring you every weekend on Sunday morning. Actor and singer Selena Gomez has been in front of the camera since age 10 when she landed a role on the kids educational program Barney and Friends. These days her co-stars are a lot less purple. She's one-third of the crime solving trio on Only Murders in the Building along with Steve Martin and Martin Short. She told me the experience of acting alongside them has changed her as a performer and a person. How has working with Martin Short and Steve Martin changed how you look at the world? In every way. These men, Steve and Marty, have been working longer than I've been alive, but they are the first ones to be on set. They take time to ask everyone they run into how their day is and on top of it they think everything through. They are wonderful people and they've helped me grow up in a lot of ways. Later in the show, Selena Gomez on Living in the Spotlight. Can you even explain what it's like to have the eyes of the world on you from the time you're seven years old? I don't think I really thought about much of the opinion of others until I was older. There's an innocence about children that I admire and a sense of my sister's completely enjoying every aspect of her life and not one person's comment can affect what she feels. Now she doesn't have to deal with it on the scale that I do, but she inspires me and she's 11. It wasn't until I was older that I realized people started to hurt my feelings and sometimes I couldn't believe it. Then meet the teens getting their hands dirty during Spud Break. Each fall, schools in small potato farming communities in Idaho close so students can help local farmers with the harvest. Connor Knighton takes us there to see how growers make the experience fun and fruitful for participants. He prints t-shirts each year and provides team dinners that feature, you guessed it, plenty of potatoes. I don't think I could ever get sick of potatoes. Really? Even after touching them all day long you're not sick of it? No, not really. I feel like that makes you like kind of excited to get a potato. As you know all the work that went into it? Yeah. That's all coming up right here on Here Comes the Sun. Selena Gomez impressively wears many hats in Hollywood. She's an accomplished actor, singer-songwriter, business mogul, and philanthropist, but her most profound achievement just might be her openness surrounding her health and mental health, helping others feel less alone. On any red carpet, Selena Gomez is the picture of beauty, poise, and confidence, but she'll be the first to tell you that things aren't always what they appear. Just cut to the chase. For instance, her latest film, Amelia Perez, Gomez co-stars as the wife of a powerful Mexican drug lord who secretly transitions with the help of a character played by Zoe Saldana. To listen is to accept. The film is a hard-hitting true crime story, a poignant love story, a journey of self-discovery, and by the way, it's also a musical. But somehow it all works. At the end of a shooting day, what were you like? What were you feeling? Usually a little sore from the dance numbers. Why'd you want to do this? I found it incredibly compelling. I've never really seen a movie like this before. I don't think I've ever been this proud of something in the acting field. And that's really saying something. At 32, Selena Gomez has a lot to be proud of. Yes, she's an accomplished actor, but she's also a very successful singer-songwriter. And thanks to her wildly popular Rare Beauty line of cosmetics, she's a billionaire, yep, and a very active philanthropist. It's all quite impressive, and even more so when you realize where she started. She was born in the Texas town of Grand Prairie. Her mom, Mandy Teefey, was only 16 years old. Selena's parents split when she was five, and she says the family had a lot of love and not much else. You struggled. Do you remember the times when it was tough to make ends meet, to put food on the table? Of course. My mom worked multiple jobs. She also was finishing high school when she was having me. When I'm doing something great today, it just makes me more thankful for the lessons that my mother taught me. Selena was barely 10 when she landed a part on TV's Barney and Friends. And a few years later, she became a fixture on the Disney Channel. From your chin to your toes, an elephant trunk grows. When you're ready, come and get it. She branched out into music and became a pop sensation. Hey, it's Selena. Does that work? And when the pandemic came, she switched gears again, hosting a popular online cooking show shot in the kitchen of her LA home. Cameras everywhere from every aspect of it. How are your cooking skills now? They're not that great, I'm not gonna lie. And then in 2021. Oh, you fancy. She helped cook up one of the biggest hits on TV, Only Murders in the Building, with co-stars Steve Martin and Martin Short. This is it. Our one chance to get to know Tim Kono. Oh, that's a nice high drama line. Okay, give me another. Why? What was the matter with that one? Nothing, it was perfect. It was just How has working with Martin Short and Steve Martin changed how you look at the world? And everyone. These men, Steve and Marty, have been working longer than I've been alive. But they are the first ones to be on set. They take time to ask everyone they run into how their day is. And on top of it, they think everything through. They are wonderful people. And they helped me grow up in a lot of ways. Ben Savage. You can just splice that under the Charles Hayes. Yeah, I'll get out the splicer. These guys have become my friends and allies and people I can ask advice from. I couldn't be more grateful to work with them. Selena Gomez is the first to admit that she's had a magical life and that it hasn't always been a bed of roses. She's been open about her health struggles, like having lupus and receiving a kidney transplant. Selena Gomez was diagnosed with lupus, depression and anxiety. She had a mental breakdown. She also decided to take her battles with anxiety and depression and her bipolar diagnosis public. Her 2022 documentary My Mind and Me is an unvarnished look at her life, the highs and the very deep lows. Were you nervous about sharing that with the world? A little bit. Once I released it, it felt like a huge relief because I am a firm believer that one of the strongest things you can do is be vulnerable. And that doesn't mean you have to pour your heart out to everyone. But I made that choice because I knew I wasn't the only one that felt that way. And if my world was already out there for everyone to see, I'd like to tell my part of the story. And to add on that, it's a dream what I'm doing. And this is part of what her dream looks like. She held a benefit for her Rare Impact Fund, a charity aimed at helping young people who suffer from the same mental health challenges she's been through. Of all the things you do and you do a lot, how important is this? This is probably the most important thing to me besides my family. But this is the cherry on top of everything. It seems another high point is her relationship with music producer Benny Blanco. You talked a bit about your personal life, so I'm just going to ask a tiny bit about one of the sexiest men alive in People magazine. Yeah, that's my man. What'd you think when you heard that? It was very charming to know that there is someone in the world that deeply cares about every tiny detail about who I am. I'm really, really lucky. So, yeah. Bienvenida. It's clear from her latest project that she's an artist who likes to take risks. But Selena Gomez's gutsiest move has been sharing her real self. And that has made all the difference. I mean, the reaction in general has been overwhelmingly positive, hasn't it? Sure. Maybe. I just, I don't, it's not that I really need anyone's approval. I think I'm just really, I'm okay with where I am and who I am. And I'm glad. I'm glad that I finally got there. Up next, an exclusive excerpt from my chat with Selena Gomez. Something you can only see right here on Here Comes the Sun. Stay with us. As promised, here's more from my interview with Selena Gomez. There have been a lot of headlines recently about, very enthusiastic headlines, about your net worth. And I know you don't like to talk about money, but I bring it up because it's remarkable, especially considering that you didn't come from money at all. Is it surreal in a way? I don't know. I'm going to give all this credit to my mom. My mom's never cared about the materialistic of what I do. She's always cared about the art. And to be honest, that's not my main focus. I'm just grateful that the choices I've made have embraced people, that people have felt seen and people feel like they can connect to something real and contribute to, if it is rare beauty, to the mental health fund with every purchase, you know, they buy, a percentage goes to our mental health fund. And I think those are the main key focuses for me. I don't care about anything else. I hope if there's anything anyone can take away is that don't let anyone tell you you can't do something. Because that's not how it works. You want a little rejection in order to feel the urge to get to that place where you can say, I can do this. And if anything, that would be a message I would love for people to take away from because that's all I did. You know, I've had people look at me when I was 11 and said, I would never be strong enough to carry my own show. And three years later, I did. So there were times that people told you, Oh, you can't? Yeah, absolutely. But I felt like the rejection fueled me a bit. It didn't doesn't mean it didn't hurt. But it did fuel me in a way and I tried to just think to myself, well, maybe just that one person thinks that there has to be other people that see something that I know I can do. Can you even explain what it's like to have that the eyes of the world on you from the time you're seven years old? I don't think I really thought about much of the opinion of others until I was older. There's an innocence about children that I admire, and a sense of my sister's completely enjoying every aspect of her life. And not one person's comment can affect what she feels. Now she doesn't have to deal with it on the scale that I do. But she inspires me and she's 11. It wasn't until I was older that I realized people started to hurt my feelings. And sometimes I couldn't believe it. And then I'd say over the past few years, it's not necessarily that it bothers me. It's more so the injustice of what people in society expect out of women. And I think for myself, being personally, there is never going to be a time where I won't stand up for women, or any community that I believe in. And I don't care if people think that, you know, maybe that's, why'd she comment or why'd she say something? I don't really care. Because for me, it's, it's my voice. And I will use it however. What are you most grateful for? I am most grateful for my health and my safety. I probably put my family before me. That's always what is important to me. Things come and go, materialistic stuff is here one day gone the next. But the most important thing in the world is making sure that the people I love, that doesn't have to be my family, it can be many people I don't even know. I think for me, that's exactly what I'm grateful for, is hopefully bringing some sort of influence and safety to people. When we come back, teens on spud break. Welcome back. Each fall, students in some parts of Idaho get a break from their studies to harvest potatoes. Connor Knighton takes us inside spud break, where students earn money and a sense of pride in their state's top crop. The annual potato harvest is the most stressful time of the year for southern Idaho farmers. There's a very limited window of time to get the spuds out of the soil and into the cellar before the cold weather arrives. For a couple of weeks, it is all hands on deck. And many of those lending a hand are teenagers. I get to know my community and I get to become familiar with what Idaho is kind of known for, which is potatoes. Mikkel Kessler is a junior at Snake River High School in Bingham County, the state's top potato producing county and home to the Idaho Potato Museum. Her school district is one of a handful that gives students two weeks off during the harvest and early fall. It's a spud break. I think a lot of our potatoes go to like McDonald's and stuff, and so it's interesting that I'm helping with potatoes that I might end up eating later. Does that make you extra careful with them? It does, yeah. I'm like, I'm making sure nothing's getting by that I want to eat myself. Kessler and other spud breakers are paid to monitor the conveyor belts and weed out any foreign objects as the potatoes head down the line. Could you do this without the help of the teenagers? Absolutely not. They are that critical to this operation. Brian Murdoch is a sixth-generation potato farmer who's employed spud breakers for decades. For me to go out and hire somebody full-time is, no way could I do that. And then also to try to find somebody temporarily, even for two weeks, that's even hard to do. Murdoch tries to make the experience memorable for the students who choose to work on the farm. He prints t-shirts each year and provides team dinners that feature, you guessed it, plenty of potatoes. I don't think I could ever get sick of potatoes. Really? Even after touching them all day long, you're not sick of it? No, not really. I feel like that makes you kind of excited to get potatoes. Do you know all the work that went into it? Yeah. It's a lot of hard work. The farms in Bingham County alone produce more than 57,000 acres of potatoes a year. The potato growers are really bound to each other too. Like last year, I was struggling to get done. But I had a neighbor come and help me. This year, farmer Nick Benson has a crop of around 20 teens helping him bring in the harvest. Looking good. School sports don't stop during harvest break. Sophomore Emma Cook begins her day with an early volleyball practice. She then heads to Benson's farm where she's learned how to drive a potato truck. I think sometimes the best learning is outside of school. Like, my dad has a joke that he always says, like, don't let school interfere with your education. I feel I'm learning very valuable lessons about, like, working hard and being responsible. Some families take vacation during the break, but the students who do work stand to make well over a thousand dollars. They may find themselves working side by side with their teachers. I started working harvest because I was a single mom with three kids and I started worrying how I was going to be able to provide Christmas for my kids. Camille Watt-Reinstra teaches English at Snake River High School and supplements her income working harvest at Thompson Farms. For two weeks, and two weeks only, her young co-workers are allowed to call her by her first name. Do you feel like anything is lost when they're out of the classroom for these two weeks? I absolutely do not. I do not feel that or see any retention loss in the classroom with these high school kids. If anything, it's a rejuvenation. They're back, ready to go with more energy. The majority of these students aren't bound for careers in agriculture. This isn't an apprenticeship. It's a tradition, a community coming together to bring in the crop. This is what we get to live every day. This is our life. We get to feel this year after year. It's wonderful. It really is. I'm Tracy Smith. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you here next time on Here Comes the Sun.