I’ve added new screen captures of Katy Perry goes behind the scenes cover shoot of “Interview” magazine.

I’ve added new high quality candids of Katy Perry arriving at Roissy Airport in Paris, France on March 3. 2012.

I’ve added new candids of Katy Perry out for dinner with her friends in Paris on March 1, 2012. She is scheduled to attend the Paris Fashion Week this week.

I’ve added new high quality candids of Katy Perry leaving the Hyatt Hotel in Paris, France on March 1, 2012.

I’ve added new photoshotos of Katy Perry did for “Interview” magazine to the gallery. You can read the entire interview from “Interview” Magazine here.

Just how big is Katy Perry? In an era when record sales are in unrecoverable free fall, her first album, One of the Boys(2008)—or her second, if you count the eponymous 2001 gospel record that she released under her birth name of Katy Hudson—sold more than five million copies. Her second (or third), Teenage Dream (2010), has sold almost as many, but even more significantly, digital sales of individual songs off the record have reached upwards of 28 million, buoyed by the near-ubiquity of five No. 1 singles (“California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” “Firework,” “E.T.,” and “Last Friday Night [T.G.I.F.]”), and placing it in a tie with Michael Jackson’s Bad(1987) for spawning the most No. 1 singles from the same album.

By now, Perry’s path to phenom-hood is well known. Perry grew up in Santa Barbara, the second of three children born to evangelical ministers. She spent most of her early years shielded by her parents from the wayward influences of secular culture (i.e., no mtv, no Madonna, no deviled eggs), but soon discovered them on her own, got into music, and started singing and performing. She went to Nashville with her mother at 15, recorded the aforementioned singer-songwritery gospel album for a Christian imprint that went bust, then got signed and dropped by two other labels before dying her blonde hair dark, trading in her T-shirts and jeans for cleavage-y candy-colored mini-dresses, and arriving at the winky Kool-Aid sex-bomb incarnation of Katy Perry with which we’ve all now become familiar—the one who shrewdly parlayed the unexpected success of songs like “I Kissed a Girl” and “Ur So Gay” into a career that might now be best described as an exploding cottage industry awash in bubbles and glitter.

Perry’s songs are fun, upbeat, and frothy—a little teen-girl wacky, a little cartoon cute, a little Harajuku rebellious—but they’re also shot through with a razor-sharp wit. She has little time for longing or dwelling or vulnerability for its own sake; there is no quest for a love and happiness that might never come, no search for salvation from loneliness and melancholy in a cruel, chaotic world. Instead, she prefers to play—with hooks, with words, with her own sexuality—so much so that it’s easy to get lost ricocheting amongst all of the puns and double entendres. (Sample lyric from “Peacock”: “Come on baby let me see / What you hiding underneath / Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock . . .  / I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock.”) But as easy, breezy, and infectious as Perry’s songs can be, beneath the surface lurks a sea of mixed emotions, jumbled motives, and contradictory impulses complicated enough to fill a Carole King record. Perhaps what is most striking about Perry is her holistic hyper-awareness of pop stardom itself as a state where the aural and the visual work in concert to create the bright light of the star, and where swiping a hook from Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” and wearing a custom-made bra that shoots whipped cream out of your nipple areas—both of which Perry does in the video for “California Gurls”—are shrewd gestures made even more evocative when done together with conviction.

In January, a sixth single off Teenage Dream, “The One That Got Away,” reached the top spot on the Billboard pop charts, capping a banner year for Perry—albeit one that has not been without its ebbs: In December, her husband of 15 months, the British actor and comedian Russell Brand, filed for divorce. Nevertheless, Perry has soldiered on, wrapping her “California Dreams” tour, and preparing for the release this month of Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection, an expanded version of the album featuring an array of bonus tracks and extras.

Back home in Los Angeles, where she was fresh off a plane from South East Asia after playing the final two shows of her tour, the 27-year-old Perry spoke to Saturday Night Liveand Bridesmaids star (and newly Oscar-nominated screenwriter) Kristen Wiig about coming to terms with her religious upbringing, the new challenges she faces, and why, despite the occasional crisis of faith, she has never stopped believing.

KRISTEN WIIG: Is this Katy Perry?

KATY PERRY: Kind of . . . [laughs] What’s up, chicken butt? Are you in the middle of some craziness at work?

WIIG: No, we don’t have a show this week. I’m at home.. What’s going on with you? Are you in L.A.?

PERRY: Yeah. I just got off of a flight from the Philippines about two hours ago. I’m being hung by my ankles right now—I need to do something to keep myself up.

WIIG: Were you singing and dancing around in little shorts?

PERRY: Yeah, like 15 different outfits in an hour-and-a-half period . . . Maybe 12 outfits—I’m exaggerating. I did a show in Indonesia and another one in Manila, and those were the last two shows of my tour, which made it 125 shows, so I’m very tired. And yesterday also wasn’t that good of a day for me for several other reasons. I had gotten into a back-and-forth with one of my best friends who I never ever argue with, and then, to top it off, right before I was supposed to go onstage, there was a bomb threat. You know those bomb-sniffing dogs? They were everywhere. They started sniffing out this backpack that was near my dressing room . . . I probably shouldn’t be giving up this kind of information because it sets me up for the future, but two dogs actually . . . .[both laugh] Well, they had to put me in an armored car, and I think I started crying at one point because I was just so overwhelmed, but we came to find out at the very end that it was chicken in the backpack that the dogs were sniffing and not something else.

WIIG: [laughs] I don’t mean to laugh, but chicken is the best possible thing that it could have been.

PERRY: I know. I should probably be a bit more discreet, but I thought, Chicken in a backpack? In the Philippines? I guess the dogs just wanted to eat. • Read full story…

I’ve added new high quality candids of Katy Perry is seen arrving at Aeroport de Roissy in Paris, France on March 1, 2012.

I’ve added two new promotional stills of Katy Perry did for “ProActive” endorsement last year to the gallery.

I’ve added new high quality candids of Katy Perry arriving LAX Airport on February 28, 2012. Katy was claimed to seen out with a new man!

I’ve added new candids of Katy Perry leaving the Vanity Fair Oscar Party held at the Sunset Towers in West Hollywood on February 26, 2012.