Selena Gomez is James Franco's 'Secret Weapon'

Selena Gomez just got a bit of high praise from James Franco this past week.

The singer and actress, who dropped a brand new song, also stars with James in In Dubious Battle, as young mother Lisa London.

“I think Selena is incredibly talented and I don’t know what people think, but it seems to me she hasn’t done tons of movies like this,” James shared on the red carpet at the premiere. “She even said that to me when I asked her to do this, she was like, ‘Yes, I want to be a part of your world, I want to try it. I’m going to go on this adventure.’”

He adds, “I felt like I had a secret weapon, that I knew she was a great actress, that people wouldn’t be expecting her in this and that I could put her in this and she would nail it.”

She even had a maternal instinct, despite not being a mother herself.

“She is like that, she is maternal in a lot of ways. It’s a scene [the birthing scene] from the book and I just thought, if we do this scene, I know Selena is just going to give everything for it. And we did. It was almost like a piece of performance art or something like that, we had multiple cameras, we were in there and we just like kept it going. We had a real nurse, we had a real baby, all this stuff and we just kind of did it.”

In Dubious Battle is out on VOD today.