Selena Gomez

Mabel Mora is stripping wallpaper in her aunt's flat and would like to be left alone. Two elderly men arrive with a theory about a death in the building and will not stop talking. Selena Gomez lets them talk. She answers flat and slow, a beat late, and the joke in Only Murders in the Building (2021) is the gap between her tempo and theirs. It is the thing she does that other actors in the part would not have thought to do, and it is the reason the series does not tip over into a two-man show.

She has been on screen since she was a child, first in Barney & Friends (2002–2004), then for five years as Alex Russo in Wizards of Waverly Place (2007–2012), with a pop career running alongside. The films that followed were an attempt to be seen as something else: Faith in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2013), and, more quietly, the voice of Mavis Dracula across four Hotel Transylvania films between 2012 and 2022. She has said the Disney years made casting directors slow to see her as an adult and that she has had to audition again and again. The route back to a leading part ran through television.

What she does in Only Murders is harder than it looks. Steve Martin and Martin Short are a double act of long standing, and the natural thing would be to compete with them. Gomez does the opposite: she underplays, and by underplaying she makes them funnier. She is also the one carrying the series' real grief, for a reason set out early, and she plays it without asking for anything. We were moved by her more than by either of the men, and it took us most of the first series to notice, because she never once signals that we should be.

Emilia Pérez (2024) shows the limit. Jacques Audiard gives her the thinner part, as Jessi, opposite Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón, and she does what she can with it. She is at her best at a karaoke machine, where her deadpan finds something to push against, and at her worst when asked to hold a long dramatic scene in Spanish with nothing to lean on. Some critics have called the performance a demonstration of versatility. We would put it more carefully: it demonstrates that she is a reactive actor, good with the right people opposite her and exposed without them.

That is not a small gift. Most comedy is timing and most timing is listening, and she listens better than almost anyone she has shared a frame with. She has said, "I don’t ever need to be the star." The evidence agrees with her. The next thing to find out is whether she can carry two hours on her own, with nobody to be quiet next to.