Jennifer Lopez Finally Wants Her Fair Share
LOS ANGELES — It was supposed to be Jennifer Lopez’s day off. Instead, Ms. Lopez, the performer, producer and branding maven, held a half- dozen business meetings in her home here, from early morning until sundown. A studio head was there, some developer types, marketing people, her TV and film producing partner, her manager and Alex Rodriguez, her boyfriend.
When she moved in two years ago, she designed an office like a boardroom, complete with a big conference table. And so she presents her outsize ideas, and she sells them: J. Lo Inc., in action. And now, she was discussing how her latest movie, “Second Act,” fits into her new entrepreneurial strategy.
Here’s what Ms. Lopez, 49, has recently come to realize: that J. Lo — the artist, the brand, the dewy face and buffed physique — is even more valuable than the entertainment industry has given her credit for. She is not after a bigger paycheck, exactly — although as the chorus of her recent single with Cardi B and DJ Khaled goes, “Yo quiero dinero.” But like a lot of people who have experienced Hollywood inequity, what she is demanding now is her fair share. “I want what I deserve,” she said.
Over the last few years, she took painstaking stock of her trajectory. “Understanding my own worth and value as a person made me understand it differently in my work, as well,” she said.
That Ms. Lopez now openly mentions private equity as easily as other actresses discuss character development may be thanks to Mr. Rodriguez, 43.
The New York Yankee baseball player-turned-sports commentator is an investor with a sizable real estate portfolio — A-Rod Inc. They’ve been dating for a year and a half. “He just opened up our vision to other ways of doing” business, she said.
Ms. Lopez believes deeply in the power of daily affirmations. Due December 21, “Second Act,” the movie she stars in and produced with her company, Nuyorican Productions, is built on a self-help maxim: “The only thing stopping you is you.”
She plays Maya de la Vargas, a 40-year- old assistant manager at a New York department store whose life hasn’t unfolded as she imagined and who now dreams of better opportunities. The story matches Ms. Lopez’s worldview, that your status early on doesn’t necessarily determine your future, but your attitude does. No one bet that the dancer who started as a Fly Girl on “In Living Color” in 1991 would become a powerhouse Hollywood entertainer and retail mogul.
“She is the master of shattering the word ‘no,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez said.
Over the last few decades, he said, she has sold several billion dollars in consumer goods, with nearly $2 billion grossed in fragrances alone. “She has over 150 million followers on social media, and over 75 percent of those are millennials,” he said.
“Second Act,” which co-stars Ms. Lopez’s best friend, Leah Remini, as her onscreen best friend, and Milo Ventimiglia as her boyfriend, puts her back in the fare that cemented her stardom: romantic comedies about strivers who move (or marry) up. Ms. Lopez said of Maya, “She realizes that she hasn’t been treating herself well, and that the little mistakes she thought made her not worthy were actually the things that led her to her purpose.”
It sounds like a passage from her 2014 memoir, “True Love,” in which she chronicled the year after her divorce from the singer Marc Anthony, father of her daughter, Emme, and son, Max. At Ms. Remini’s urging, she went to therapy. “I discovered I had low self- esteem,” she wrote.
In 2011, she became a judge for “American Idol,” considering it a way to reintroduce herself to a public that had cooled on her. “People were saying they liked me, which made me realize how many years I’d spent thinking they didn’t, and that affected how I felt about myself,” Ms. Lopez wrote in her book.
Between therapy and reality TV were the epiphanies that brought her to a new awareness of her clout; to her recently concluded Las Vegas concert residency, when she earned a record $1.43 million in ticket sales on one night, and danced her butt off for three years; to her energized business mind-set; to Mr. Rodriguez.
Her vision now is for artists to develop their ideas independently, then find a profit- sharing distributor. “I should be a partner,” she said. As artists, “we’re not disposable.”
Ms. Lopez said she hoped to leave a mark on “the world I want my daughter to live in and my son, who’s going to be a man who respects women and understands women and gives them their worth.”
As a professional who carved out a path where there was none, “I’m only with people who understand that we’re in the history- making business,” she added. “We’re in the trailblazing business, we’re in the break- down- the- walls, kick- theglass- ceiling business. That’s the business that we’re in. If you’re not on board for that, then we can’t work together.”