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Romantic comedies might be seen as pure fluff by some people, but Jennifer Lopez’s latest, “Marry Me”, gets at truths about stardom that the star could identify with.
In an interview with the New York Times, Lopez opens up about showing a more vulnerable side of herself in a movie about a famous singer attempting to navigate a private life in the public eye.
“Once you’ve gotten burned a few times, you realize, ‘I have to be careful.’ If things are too deep and you put them out there, somebody might step on your heart,” she says.
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Some moments in the film, including a scene in which her character turns on “The Tonight Show” to find Jimmy Fallon cracking jokes about her, felt extraordinarily personal.
“I had to remind myself in this movie that this was actually a safe place to let those feelings out,” Lopez says. “They’re making fun of me, that hurts. My instinct was to act like it didn’t.”
Talking about her own relationship to fame, she explains, “You really just want to sing and dance and act. This whole other thing comes along with it that you have to learn how to navigate — having that public life, this artistic life and then your private life. What you want is just a regular life, like anybody else,” she says with a pause. “All of it is put under scrutiny.”
Lopez also talks about rekindling her romance with Ben Affleck after 19 years.
“I would say we learned our lesson the first time,” she says. “To hold it sacred. You have to do what feels good to you all the time. But at the same time, you learn from the past, you do things better the second time. There’s a part of it that, yes, we’re together. But there’s a part of it that’s not, you know, being so open the way we were when we were so young and in love many years ago.”
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Looking back on her relationship with baseball star Alex Rodriguez, Lopez says, “When you’re in things, you do what feels right. And I don’t beat myself up over ‘I wish I had done this differently’ or ‘Did I do too much?’ That’s what was comfortable at the time. I did what I did. He did what he did. And it was fine. The relationship stuff had nothing to do with being public or not being public.
“You can’t live life and think that things are just mistakes: I just messed up there, I messed up there. No, it’s all lessons,” Lopez adds. “It’s really what can you extrapolate from it that is going to help you grow and go to the next level of understanding yourself, finding yourself and being able to be at peace with your life, at peace with who you are.”