No need to "Wonder" any longer — Shawn Mendes' In Wonder documentary is now streaming!
The touching, behind-the-scenes film takes viewers into the 22-year-old pop star's life as he travels the world on his last tour, heads home to be with his family and performs on stage with his girlfriend Camila Cabello.
Here are some key takeaways from the Netflix documentary:
He has a sweet relationship with his little sister
Mendes has several important women in his life — and his 17-year-old sister Aaliyah is definitely one of them.
In one part of the film, Mendes heads home to visit his family (and, of course, to perform at Toronto's massive Rogers Centre). The visit to Toronto happens to coincide with his sister's first day of school and he picks her up before they run to a grass field "where we grew up" and lay down.
"When he first started singing, he honestly wasn't the greatest. I was like, 'Okay whatever, let’s see where this goes.' It was just constant noise at my house. So annoying. It was awful," Aaliyah says in the documentary. "I asked him if he wanted to be famous one day and he shut the idea down so fast. He was like, 'No I don't want to be famous. It seems awful.' I don't know if he remembers that but I remember that like it was yesterday."
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Aaliyah then asks Mendes about the anecdote, to which he replies, "I obviously changed my mind."
Aaliyah reappears in the documentary at the end of the film when she and their father Manny arrive at a venue in Mexico City for Mendes' last show on tour.
"Why do you look so cool?" he asks his sister.
He keeps a manifestation journal
If you write it down, it becomes true. At least that's what Mendes thinks.
In one scene, he and Cabello, 23, look through an old journal where over the past few years he'd fill a page repeating positive affirmations.
I control my brain with my voice. I sing with no tension. My chest voice is strong and healthy.
"That's why it worked. Because I wrote it in my manifestation journal," says Mendes after showing two pages where he wrote that he'd sell out the Rogers Centre — and a later page when he actually did.
"It was persistent," adds Cabello.
He was devastated after he had to cancel a São Paulo show
At the end of his massive Shawn Mendes: The Tour, his voice started to struggle.
Ahead of the scheduled show, he recorded a video of himself saying that he was feeling sick but "I watched some Kobe Bryant videos and I feel great." But things weren't looking as good as he thought.
Mendes is seen visiting a doctor, where he got some tests done. Hours before his scheduled second show at Allianz Parque in São Paulo, Mendes struggles to do vocal exercises on FaceTime with his vocal coach.
"It makes me very nervous," his vocal coach says on the phone about his voice. "That's my feeling… Based off of how your voice sounds, you shouldn't be talking."
Just a half-hour before doors were set to open, he gets on the phone with his doctor and vocal coach and they "unanimously" decide he should cancel his show or else he could permanently damage his vocal cords.
"You have really no voice; we have 11 shows to go," says the coach. "For an outside stadium, you're going to hurt yourself."
Mendes is then left alone as he starts sobbing about having to cancel the show for his fans. He grabs his face and looks down, devastated.
He then heads to the stands of the stadium and FaceTimes his mom while looking at the stage where he would have performed. The documentary then shows Mendes' crying fans as they find out that Mendes had canceled the show.
"You just feel the deepest pit in your stomach," he says.
After the canceled show, he looks outside his window to see a large crowd of fans chanting that they love him.
"I can't even believe how good people are. It's just a beautiful thing," he says.
Looking back at the experience, he says, "The hardest part was feeling like I let them down. These next 10 years are where everything I do is going full speed. It's like an athlete in their prime. I have to keep going."
He sometimes misses home
While in London for the first leg of his tour, he tells the audience that his voice was "cutting out on me" and that he'd need help to sing along.
"I promise to sing my heart out but I only have what I got in my voice," he says.
He then gets off stage and is seen on his knees crying about how much he's struggling on stage.
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"Half of me is saying 'make sure you say you're grateful,'" he says as the footage of the low London moment plays onscreen. "Because I am. I love these performances. I've never had more fun in my life, but… at the same time I just want to hang with my parents and watch movies."
"[I want to] drive around the suburb and lay on a soccer field and smoke a joint and stare at the stars with my friends and eat some beef jerky," he adds. "Really some small-town thoughts. I think that I miss that a little bit, I think I miss that."
He got an apartment with Camila Cabello to do “normal things”
Cabello knows what he did last summer!
In the documentary, Mendes reveals that he and his girlfriend spent the summer of 2019 renting an apartment in New York City where the two did "normal things" like cook eggs and learn how to use a Keurig.
"This is a really cool thing to be a 21-year-old guy and getting older. That's happening for me too," he says.
Before then, the documentary highlighted the two rehearsing for their VMAs performance of "Señorita."
Cabello walks over to him and whispers to him: "I love you. Do you know that?" Shawn replies, "I know." The two then do calming breathing exercises before their performance.
In a separate scene — which was previously teased in the movie's trailer — Mendes says all of his songs are about his love for Cabello.
"My song comes on the radio or something and I'm like, 'Everything's about you. They're all … They have always been about you,'" he recalls telling the 23-year-old "Havana" singer. "She goes, 'What do you mean?' They're all about you. Like every song I've ever wrote."
"I don't think I’ll be able to write songs that really do it justice, that can really capture the feelings with her," he adds, comparing singing about his love to taking a photo of the moon. "When you see the moon or the stars and you just can't and it doesn't look good. And you're like 'it's not supposed to be captured.' It’s just supposed to be for us.'"
The two stars also open up about meeting each other while Mendes and Fifth Harmony opened for Austin Mahone in 2014.
"He was so super hyper-focused on what he was doing," remembers Cabello with a laugh. "I thought he was cute but he's doing other stuff so whatever."
The two then reconnected backstage at a Taylor Swift show, which ignited their spark. The two would go on to record "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and do a mini-Jingle Ball tour.
"She was always there to look out for me as a human. She's got my back and I think that's what a partner is for," Mendes says about his girlfriend.
Shawn Mendes: In Wonder is streaming now on Netflix.
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