Selena Gomez Joins Cate Blanchett in Brady Corbet’s X-Rated Epic

Selena Gomez is heading somewhere bold — and she’s got some serious company. The singer and actress has joined Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in an untitled new film from The Brutalist director Brady Corbet, a project already generating real heat out of Cannes. The film is reportedly being called The Origin of the World, though nothing official has been confirmed on that front yet.

The news first broke when Blanchett let slip her involvement during a masterclass appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, mentioning the Corbet collaboration before trade publications could confirm it. Variety subsequently locked in the full cast — Blanchett, Fassbender, and Gomez — while reports of Gomez’s casting had already circulated earlier through The InSneider.

So what exactly is this movie? Corbet has been deliberately cagey, but he’s shared enough to make it clear this isn’t going to be a conventional Hollywood release. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, he described it as “X-rated” and explicitly centered on the body — but was quick to shut down speculation that it’s a horror film. “All I can say about the new film is that there’s been a lot of misinformation,” he said. “It’s true that the film is an X-rated movie, and it’s true that it takes place mostly in the 1970s, but the film spans from the 19th century into the present day — it’s just predominantly focused on the ’70s. The film is really, really genre-defying. But it was reported that the movie has something to do with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is not true at all.”

What We Know About the Film So Far

The scale here is hard to overstate. Corbet is working from a script that reportedly runs to around 200 pages — a detail that raised eyebrows at the Storyhouse Screenwriting Festival in Dublin where he mentioned it, given that The Brutalist clocked in at over three hours even with a shorter screenplay. The projected runtime for this one is four hours. Principal photography is planned for this summer across Portugal and South Africa, over more than 50 shooting days.

The film will be shot on ultra-rare eight-perf 65mm cameras, the same large-format approach that gave The Brutalist its immersive visual weight. Andrew Morrison is producing through the Kaplan Morrison banner, a continuation of the partnership that brought Corbet’s last film to life. No distributor is attached yet — though given that The Brutalist landed at A24 and earned 10 Oscar nominations, it’s safe to assume the competition for this one will be serious once it’s ready.

Thematically, The Origin of the World is shaping up to be every bit as ambitious as its predecessor. American mysticism and the history of the occult form the backbone of the story, and Corbet is working with occult historian Mitch Horowitz to trace cultist belief structures across American culture. The film will also explore immigration from China to California — giving it the same sweeping historical reach that defined The Brutalist‘s portrait of postwar America. Corbet had also previously mentioned that the film will explore “Northern California’s economy” in some capacity.

A Cast Built for This Kind of Work

The casting is striking on multiple levels. Blanchett and Fassbender already have an established on-screen chemistry — they played a married couple navigating mutual suspicion inside British intelligence in Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag last year, a film that showed just how well they work together under pressure. Corbet gets to lean into that dynamic rather than build it from scratch.

Blanchett, of course, needs little introduction — she’s one of the most decorated actors working today, with collaborations spanning Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, and David Fincher. Her most recent film, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Fassbender, meanwhile, brings the kind of physically and emotionally committed intensity that Corbet’s work has always demanded from its leads.

And then there’s Gomez — who, in some ways, is the most intriguing piece of this puzzle.

Another Step Away From the Disney Chapter

For anyone who has been watching Gomez’s career arc, joining a Brady Corbet X-rated epic isn’t a surprise so much as a logical next move. The former Wizards of Waverly Place star has spent years deliberately and methodically dismantling the squeaky-clean image that made her famous. Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was an early, jarring signal. Her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Emilia Pérez last year was a full arrival. This feels like the next chapter.

Back in 2023, Gomez was direct about where she stood with her past. “I definitely feel free of it,” she told Variety. But she also acknowledged that the distance isn’t always clean. “Sometimes I get triggered. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my past, it’s just that I’ve worked so hard to find my own way. I don’t want to be who I was. I want to be who I am.”

She’s talked openly about the particular weight of being a Disney kid — the constant self-monitoring, the impossible standard of wholesomeness. “I wasn’t a wild child by any means, but I was on Disney, so I had to make sure not to say ‘What the hell?’ in front of anyone,” she said. “It’s stuff that I was also putting on myself to be the best role model I could be.”

What’s changed, she’s said, is her definition of what that actually means. “Now I think being the best role model is being honest, even with the ugly and complicated parts of yourself.”

A four-hour X-rated epic about American mysticism and the occult, shot on 65mm in Portugal and South Africa alongside two of the most respected actors on the planet, directed by the man who just made one of the most talked-about films of the decade — that’s about as honest a statement of intent as it gets.