LOS ANGELES – By any measure, Selena Gomez is one of the biggest stars in the pop culture firmament.

A chart-topping pop singer who has sold more than 210 million singles worldwide, the former Disney Channel star is also a successful actress and television producer, picking up an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nomination this year for the hit show Only Murders In The Building (2021 to present).

She is a media darling as well, a tabloid fixture because of high-profile romances with fellow pop stars such as Justin Bieber, The Weeknd and Nick Jonas. And in 2016, she became a Guinness World Records record-holder as the first person to hit 100 million followers on Instagram.

But as her career soared, she was battling serious mental and physical health issues behind closed doors – including a diagnosis of lupus and bipolar disorder, which led to depression and a kidney transplant in 2017.

Now, Gomez is lifting the lid on what happened in Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, a documentary debuting on Apple TV+ on Friday.

It offers a raw and intimate look at her six-year journey to deal with those struggles, and hints at the pressure she felt from the scrutiny over the end of her relationship with Bieber in 2018.

At a screening in Los Angeles in early October, the 30-year-old American celebrity wrings her hands nervously as she introduces the film, which was directed and co-written by Alek Keshishian and originally meant to be a record of Gomez’s Revival tour (2015-2016).

“I just wanted to say thank you so much for being here. It’s a little nerve-racking, to be honest. I share a lot of myself in this documentary and I hope that you guys enjoy it. I don’t want to know what you think after,” she says, laughing nervously.

“And I want Alek to talk about his vision, and why I decided to do this because he can speak eloquently and I am just going to make jokes the whole time,” adds Gomez, who has headlined films such as Spring Breakers (2012) and Monte Carlo (2011) and also produces and stars in her own cooking show, Selena + Chef (2020 to present).

At a separate press event for the film, American film-maker Keshishian, 48, tells The Straits Times that the star did not ask him to delete any footage he wanted to include because of the friendship that developed between them.

Keshishian says he shared a similar bond with American pop queen Madonna, the subject of his groundbreaking 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth Or Dare – the highest-grossing documentary of all time for more than a decade.

With Gomez, “that unspoken trust meant I would never put anything in that she did not want”, he says in a video call.

At the same time, she did not like everything shown in the film, which shadows her as she goes on tour, meets fans, deals with her health and other issues – and occasionally breaks down on camera.

“She didn’t love everything, some stuff made her uncomfortable. But she realised that they were important,” he says.

Gomez had asked to meet Keshishian after watching Madonna: Truth Or Dare, and one of the things she had liked about that film was how “nothing was sugarcoated”.

So for My Mind & Me, “she never asked me not to include certain things”, he says.

“She never said to me, ‘Don’t put that in.’ It was very respectful. I could see what worked and didn’t work, and I think we were in sync. It was the same thing with Madonna. She never gave me a single note of, ‘You have to do this’,” he adds of his influential fly-on-the-wall film, which became a template for pop star documentaries.

Of Gomez, he says: “We would have discussions about (the film), and of course I would be interested in (what she said) because she’s another artiste whom I respect. And it’s her life.

“But we would come to a mutual game plan on some of the bigger issues. There was never any ‘You can’t’ or ‘You must use this’, ever.”

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me will debut on Apple TV+ on Friday.