Jennifer Lopez is 2 days away from releasing her most private album to this point, This Is Me…Now, which is impressed by husband Ben Affleck. However, being that she’s Jennifer Lopez, merely placing out a brand new album is not sufficient. The 54-year-old singer is concurrently dropping a movie — This Is Me…Now: A Love Story — on Prime Video, which takes heavy affect from her and Affleck’s decades-spanning love story.
“I felt like I needed to do one thing particular,” Lopez explains to Yahoo Leisure of her $20 million, self-funded ardour challenge. (A forthcoming documentary rounds out the three-part spectacle.) “I felt just like the music deserved that.”
In 2002, when “Bennifer” was first plastered on practically each tabloid cowl, Lopez launched her first Affleck-infused album, This Is Me…Then. The truth that the follow-up was 20 years within the making is why Lopez feels prefer it deserved extra.
“Individuals know the story of me and Ben, that is not the story I need to inform,” she says.
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is “a narrative-driven cinematic odyssey, steeped in mythological storytelling and private therapeutic,” per the movie’s synopsis. Lopez performs herself in a narrative a few hopeless romantic. After real love is misplaced, she should undergo a journey of self-discovery — and a number of other failed relationships — earlier than studying to like herself and finally discovering real love once more. So, how a lot of the narrative is rooted in reality?
“It is meta,” she says. “It isn’t autobiographical, but it surely’s undoubtedly impressed by occasions of my life and of different folks’s form of journeys that I’ve watched. But it surely’s undoubtedly the story of a hopeless romantic’s journey by means of life and their seek for love. That actually form of sums it up in a means, and there is undoubtedly issues from my life which are infused and impressed within the story.”
Lopez and Affleck first called off their engagement in 2004. They’ve each been open about how the rise of tabloid tradition and media scrutiny contributed to the demise of their relationship. 20 years later, they’re nonetheless two of the paparazzi’s favourite targets, with each expression and photograph meticulously analyzed on-line. (Many instances, incorrectly.) As for a way they deal with that now, Lopez says she is extra “assured” in understanding their fact.
“Truthfully, we’re simply form of very grown,” Lopez says. “All the pieces appears so necessary if you’re youthful, you already know what I imply? You assume every little thing’s going to be taken away from you and every little thing that everyone says or thinks about you issues, and as you grow old you notice it actually does not. Not that you do not care what folks assume, I do, however on the identical time I really feel very assured in understanding who I’m and what I’ve to supply. There’s probably not something anyone can say to shake that.”
Lopez continues, “The factor I really like extra about who I’m at present versus perhaps 20 years in the past is I can actually proceed evolving, and rising, and understanding that I am not the place I am gonna be in two years, or 5 years or 10 years. It will be even higher. It is actually the thrilling half.”
In fact, when Lopez and Affleck did break up the primary time, it was onerous on the pair. If Lopez might return and inform herself one thing in 2004, she says it could be this: “It is gonna be higher than you assume. So simply dangle on.”
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story drops on Prime Video on Friday, Feb. 16.
