Disney star Selena Gomez has been cooking up a storm in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and is now ready to share her funny and sometimes humiliating efforts to the rest of the world. Selena + Chef is a 10-episode unscripted series where famous chefs appear remotely to teach the singer-actress to cook dishes from simple omelettes to octopus and it will be debuting on the HBO MAX streaming platform on August 13.
The show was filmed using remote cameras at Gomez’s kitchen in her Los Angeles area home where the Lose You to Love Me singer was in lockdown with her grandparents and three friends.
“I thought this would be something lighthearted, because I was getting definitely down,” Gomez, 28, told television reporters during a preview on Wednesday.
“This was an opportunity to make people smile. I hope they are going to laugh because I look like a fool,” said Gomez, whose 185 million Instagram following is one of the largest in the world. “I love cooking, I just don’t know how to do it all the time.”
On the show, spills burns and at times inedible dishes emerge as chefs such as Antonia Lofaso, Ludo Lefebvre and Roy Choi appear on screen from their own kitchens to teach Gomez how to handle pasta, tacos, cookies and other dishes.
The octopus dish did not turn out well. “People really didn’t like that,” Gomez recalled. And the French omelette turned out to be more complicated than she envisaged. “It was really difficult because I am so used to doing it the American way,” said Gomez.
Gomez said she has made several of the dishes again since filming ended, but when asked what she was best at whipping up fast she kept to her old favourites.
“I can kill PB and J,” she said of her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Gomez, was a regular in Disney as part of TV shows, music and movies. Since then, she has developed her career as a solo artiste and philanthropist. Meanwhile, her struggles with lupus have received support from the public. The young star is reported to be worth US$75 million (S$104.6 million), according to Evening Standard.
Born in Texas in July 1992, Gomez made her big break in Barney and Friends. Based on Biography.com, the starlet also appeared in Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
In 2009, she launched her album Kiss & Tell. In the next few years the Disney alum had a number of successful work. She also released a hit song called Lose You To Love Me.