4 Strict Rules Selena Gomez Makes Her Employees Follow
Selena Gomez runs a tight ship.
Denis Makarenko / Shutterstock Selena Gomez has been in the TV, film and music industries for most of her life, from her "Barney & Friends" beginnings to her Disney Channel notoriety and her impressive pop music career.
But behind every successful star is a team of managers, assistants and more that keep the Hollywood machine running — and Gomez is no different. And when Gomez's life was explored in the Apple TV documentary, "My, Mind & Me," fans got a rare insight into her life and career from a behind-the-scenes standpoint.
4 strict rules Selena Gomez makes her employees follow
Gomez has a tight-knit team and, given how much the star has gone through over the years, she is clearly backed by a dedicated support system.
1. Selena Gomez's staff must keep up with her rigid schedule.
In 2016, Gomez's longtime friend and hairstylist Marisa Marino shared the busy schedule Gomez and her staff kept while the singer was on her Revival world tour.
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“10:30am: Meet up with whoever is awake for either avocado toast, a workout or spa time! We all love a good steam room,” she wrote.
But the real work starts in the afternoon.
“5pm: Start hair and makeup for Selena for her meet and greet.”
“6:30 pm: The makeup artist and I have dinner at catering while Selena does her meet and greet.”
“8pm: Begin hair and makeup for the show.”
When Gomez's show begins, Marino's work is also just starting.
"There are 4 different quick changes throughout the show so I go into the pit area and jam out and then go back into the quick change room one song before she comes off stage to change," Marino explained.
The team's night doesn't end until well into the early hours of the morning as they have to ride in Gomez's tour bus to the next city for up to 15 hours after they leave the venue at 11:30 pm.
2. Employees have to step in to help Gomez when needed.
Whoever works with her will have to show empathy and compassion toward her mental health, something she has struggled with for years.
“I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” Gomez told Rolling Stone in an interview that when she hit her early twenties is when things “got really dark.”
“When I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad,” she said.
In Gomez’s documentary, one of her close friends, Raquelle Stevens, revealed that the people close to her had to have an intervention.
“We had to have a really serious conversation with her, of like, 'What is going on?'” Stevens remembered. “Her answer was also like, 'I don't know. I can't explain it. I wish you could feel what it feels like to be in my head.'”
“I just remember it being very chaotic and she was hearing all of these voices. They just kept getting louder and louder and louder. That triggered some kind of psychotic break,” Stevens recalled. “If anybody saw what I saw, in the state that she was in at the mental hospital, they wouldn't have recognized her at all.”
3. Sometimes working for Gomez means knowing when to quit.
Gomez’s former assistant Theresa Marie Mingus revealed in her documentary that a key part of her time working for Gomez involved intervening when the singer suffered a breakdown during her Revival tour — which ended up being canceled before the artist completed her scheduled performances.
“At one point, she's like, 'I don't want to be alive right now. I don't want to live,'” Mingus revealed during Gomez's documentary. “And I'm like, 'Wait, what?' It was one of those moments where you look in her eyes and there's nothing there. It was just pitch black. And it's so scary.”
4. Mental health should be a priority for Gomez's employees.
Aside from her illustrious entertainment career, Gomez has also made a name for herself in the beauty industry as the founder of the cosmetics company Rare Beauty. Though Rare Beauty's main focus is makeup, everything Gomez does leads back to her prioritization of mental and emotional wellness, so Rare Beauty's employees must take it seriously as well.
Elyse Cohen, VP of social impact and inclusion at Rare Beauty and president of the Rare Impact Fund, told Fast Company that the makeup brand values mental health resources above all else, and every Rare Beauty employee is trained in Mental Health First Aid and is offered time to take care of their own well-being.
“[We’ve hosted] everything from breath work and meditation to stretch classes and even a succulent class to encourage employees to step away from their desks for a mental break,” Gomez once told Architectural Digest.
Taylor Haynes is a writer based in Chicago. She writes for Entertainment & News at YourTango.