Selena Gomez has been acting since she was a small childafter appearing on Barney & Friends, but became a teen star with her recurring role on Disney Channel's The Wizards of Waverly Place. She also enjoys a significant pop career, which she launched in 2009 with her album Kiss & Tell when she was just 17 years old. Not only has her music won several awards, but she has continued to work as an actress, earning multiple Emmy Nominations for her work on the hit show Just Murder in the Building.

Meanwhile, Glenn Powell has quickly emerged as one of Hollywood's most charming leading men, having recently appeared in the decent 'Twisters', the huge hit 'Anyone But You', the even bigger hit 'Top Gun: Maverick' and the impressive comedy/thriller 'Hit Man'. Powell came to public attention in Richard Linklater's 2016 sports film Everybody Wants Some!!, but has worked professionally since his youth, appearing in several high-profile TV shows.

Turns out Powell and Gomez share a title in their respective early filmographies. When Gomez was just 11 and Powell just 15, they both appeared — in very small roles — in Robert Rodriguez's 2003 cyberthriller Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over , perhaps the weirdest movie in the weird and weird . persistent, movie franchise. Gomez played a girl at a water park who has a brief conversation with Juni (Daryl Sabara), the film's main character. Later in the film, Powell plays a video game player trapped in a VR world. Gomez is credited as a "water park girl." Powell is credited as "the boy with the long fingers."

The premise of Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids movies is simple but compelling. The series begins with a pair of young siblings (Sabarra and Alexa Vega) who learn that their parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) are top-secret super-spies. When their parents are kidnapped, the kids have to don their parents' ultra-cute spy gear and fly to the rescue. Spy Kids is cartoonish, fast and funny and was a big hit in 2001. It continued in 2002, and the third film, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, was released in 2003.

Game Over was the weirdest movie ever made up to that point. It took place mostly in the virtual world of a high-tech video game, where Alexa Vega's character was captured by three evil scientists, all subconscious iterations of the Toymaker, a villain played by Sylvester Stallone. Juni had to enter the simulation and win a series of increasingly difficult video game challenges to save her sister from harm. Inside the simulation, Juni keeps messing with a mythical gamer nicknamed The Guy, who is said to be skilled enough to beat the mythical level 5.

The film returns Banderas and Cugino, but also has small roles for Steve Buscemi, George Clooney, Elijah Wood, Mike Judge, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Tony Shalhoub and Alan Cummings. And so it was the last screen role for Ricardo Montalbanwho played Juni's grandfather. In the real world, Montalban sits in a wheelchair, but in the video game world, he has the powerful body of a robot. The VR simulations are also all in 3-D. Unfortunately, the 3-D effects were terrible and were not used with the gray-shade polarized lenses of most 3-D films, but with old-fashioned, red-and-blue anaglyph 3-D.

Also, the CGI was clunky and bad. Spy Kids 3-D cost $37 million to make, and presumably all of that went to talent; its visuals are distinctly cheap.

Glenn Powell's role is very small. He seems to be merely heralding some sort of exposition. He tells Juni that he has arrived at the Crash Arena and must fight the Mechanism to reach Level 2. Powell, even as a teenager, has the charisma of a game show host, telling Juni to "get out there and fighting" with a smile on his face. At the end of the Mech battle, Powell briefly returns to knock out Juni at Level 2.

Gomez's role is a bit more surreal. In the early parts of the film, Juni has already retired from being a spy and is now working as a child detective. He presents himself in a film-noir-style narration, complete with a saxophone on the soundtrack. He arrived at a water park to investigate a crime, or rather, to locate all the missing water. He approaches a mysterious girl in a winter coat and announces that he has solved her case. The girl is Selena Gomez, who looks like an 11-year-old version of a Russian femme fatale. It seems, Juni says, that "they" just turned off all the skates in the winter. “Who are they?” she asks. "The people who indeed own this place,” Juni says mysteriously. "Oh," says Gomez. Then she is out of the movie.

Not very lucrative roles, but enough to keep the two youngsters busy. Also, the Spy Kids movies were a big deal in the 2000s, so they were probably both cast in their roles over many, many other promising child actors.

Spy Kids 3-D wasn't very well-received, but it made $197 million at the box office, so everyone had to walk away with money in their pockets. The latest Spy Kids movie was released in 2023.