“I don’t think I understand my full capabilities, to be honest,” Selena Gomez tells me with a shy smile, sitting on a shaded Croisette rooftop with the sun shining behind her. “It’s a very interesting situation that I particularly have to be in, but I genuinely feel like I can go places if the right person believes.” She’s speaking about Emilia Perez, the electrifying new French-Mexican musical drama which has taken the Cannes Film Festival 2024 by storm. For a project this audacious, this unusual, every person involved needed to accept a high level of risk. Even its revered director, the Cannes-winning auteur Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Dheepan), was entering uncharted territory. He asked others to do the same. “It takes people taking a risk on me like Jacques did,” Gomez says. “It worked because he didn’t know me.”

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Emilia Perez finds Audiard exploring familiar themes of male violence—its shape, its psychology, its ramifications—in an utterly new milieu. It begins with Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a high-powered defense attorney in Mexico City who keeps finding herself on the wrong side of justice. She’s contacted by Manitas, a notorious cartel boss, who makes her an offer she can’t refuse: accept a fortune and live the life she’s always wanted, in exchange for the underground facilitation of gender-reassignment surgery. And so Rita accepts, taking the money and running, while Manitas transforms into Emilia—both versions of whom are played by the Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón—to embark on her own dream life. Their lives—along with that of Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Gomez)—collide years later, to explosive ends.

To say much more would ruin the discovery of this festival—a film that wears its earnest heart on its sleeve, that asks each of its stars to go to places they’ve never gone before, and that careens between genres to create a whole new one. But Gascón says that when it came to her character’s extraordinary journey, she asked Audiard to remember one very basic tenet: “It just came down to the fact that a trans person is just any human being,” she says. The sheer inventiveness of the filmmaking breathes fascinating, complex emotional power into that foundation.

Audiard wrote the first treatment for Emilia Perez during COVID-19 lockdown. He was inspired by a specific plot point in the 2018 Boris Razon novel Écoute, of a drug dealer planning to undergo gender-reassignment surgery, and out of that devised an opera libretto. This evolved into a proper script as he dug further into the characters. He changed the primary male lawyer role to that of an ambitious, cynical woman, and saw the multitudes contained within Emilia. After meeting with several actors and struggling to land on the right star, he found Gascón. From that first meeting to this week’s premiere, they’ve been talking about Emilia Perez for years, with the 72-year-old Audiard getting an education in the process.

“I had a lot of conversations with him over the years—sending a lot of emails, and a lot of pictures of my body to inform a lot of scenes. We really interacted and we nourished each other mutually, so it went both ways,” says Gascón, mostly known for her work in telenovelas. “He developed a better, deeper understanding [of trans identity] than when we started. He had a different feeling for the subject because it became less theoretical for him.”

The French musical duo of Camille and Clément Ducol started working with Audiard on songs way back in the spring of 2020, and after scouting some locations in Mexico, the director decided instead to helm the movie entirely on soundstages in Paris. “When Jacques decided we wouldn’t go to Mexico to film it, that was the scariest moment for me because I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something that’s going wrong,’” Gascón says. “That’s when I really doubted.” But the shift worked, allowing for the allotment of ample rehearsal time for the many elaborate musical numbers and enhancing the film’s theatrical, dreamlike quality. The actors collaborated closely with everyone from choreographer Damien Jalet to Steadicam operator Sacha Naceri, which was crucial given Audiard’s commitment to a kind of aesthetic rigor.

“I started out as a ballet dancer, and you live and you die in the rehearsal—it’s always what happens backstage, that is where you truly find yourself,” says Saldaña. “That is where you fail so many times until you find what works…. Your director molds you and stretches you and throws you out—and then you give your own ideas and figure out what it is that is not working.”

This is also where the three principal actors got to know one another. “A lot of our numbers specifically were very personalized to our characters, so it was very interesting to see how everyone would kind of mold into it,” Gomez says. They improvised with one another and honed their characters’ sticky dynamics, Gascón explains: “That was really incredible—to be able to follow the rehearsals all the way through and to see this process of creation.” She faced the particular challenge of playing both Manitas, who’s not only a man but a murderous crime lord, and Emilia, who pursues redemption for her past while discovering her authentic self: “I had two different characters in one, two different voices. I had to learn how to move, learn how to dance.”

While Gascón is the thrilling discovery of Emilia Perez, the film showcases startling new sides of Saldaña and Gomez as actors—not the least because their performances are largely in Spanish. In the lead role, Saldaña is revelatory—her dancing chops on full display, her tender singing voice in perfect harmony with her emotionally charged portrayal. Watching her, you sense the Marvel and Avatar star was hungering for a role like this.

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“I used to take my train in New York City and go to the Angelika [in Soho], get my coffee and watch a movie and kind of go, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to do that,’” Saldaña says. “Obviously I took a different course, and I’m so proud of the first 20 years of my career, but it was always with that notion that I was going to land here.” In those rehearsals, watching a master in Audiard at work, she’d say to herself: “What the fuck? Like, I’m here.” It was almost overwhelming. She worried she was getting in her head too much. “I didn’t want to stand in my own way,” she says. “This was what I wanted for a very long time. I had to just get out, enjoy it, give it my all and trust that this man was going to wrangle me, bring me a little forward, push me a little out—that I was going to be in good hands.”

The Golden Globe–nominated Gomez (Only Murders in the Building) felt less secure than Saldaña when it came to acting out dramatic scenes in Spanish, especially since Audiard himself does not speak the language; he relied on others on set (like Gascón) and wanted to focus on the dialogue’s melody. “Scariest thing was speaking in Spanish, for sure,” Gomez says. “I don’t think I doubt my performance necessarily, but yeah, I definitely wish I could’ve done that a bit more defined.” Saldaña, sitting beside her, interjects with a proud smile toward Gomez: “You were amazing. Are you kidding me?” Gascón, speaking mostly through a Spanish-language interpreter for this interview, also nods in emphatic agreement.

But Gomez, also a Grammy-winning musician, found herself soaring during the musical elements. She’s got one Moulin Rouge–tinted number that she runs away with; another deliciously invites audience participation, with Gomez owning the camera. It’s through singing in Spanish, in fact, that Gomez says she was able to access her intense character, whose role turns pivotal in the endgame. “Actually, I prefer singing in Spanish to English—I absolutely love it,” Gomez says. “I don’t know why I can do it easier than English, but I can. It’s so weird! So I can’t speak it, but I sing it better.”

Emilia Perez has emerged as one of the Cannes competition’s biggest hits with both audiences and critics; it’s a strong prize contender going into this weekend and seems likely to land a splashy US distribution deal. In a lineup filled with bold swings—from the self-financed sagas (calamities?) of Megalopolis and Horizon to the body-horror spectacular The Substance, a consistent theme is seeing directors push themselves and audiences into the maximalist unknown.

Audiard accomplishes this with surprising grace and a peculiar cinematic beauty. Gascón thinks back to the director running around the set, cheering his trio of stars on: laughing with them, crying with them. “Working with him is a little crazier than you’d imagine,” she says with a laugh. “It’s a man that’s running around us!” Saldaña cracks up in agreement, then turns to Gascón: “You guys are very similar. Sometimes Karla and Jacques would just go head-to-head. I’d be like, ‘No, no, no,’ but you guys were like, ‘We’re not fighting. This is passion!’” Gascón concurs: “Love made this movie.”

Audiences, certainly, have felt that. As Saldaña, Gomez, and Gascón sat for this interview, they were beaming. Their huge gamble paid off, both individually and collectively. “I’m very happy,” Gomez says. Saldaña, meanwhile, gets a bit choked up reflecting on how the project has impacted her. “I unlocked in myself that I can do it—that I have it in me, that I can continue challenging myself,” she says. “I can really surprise myself.”