JLo relating to her superstar character
Jennifer Lopez stars with Owen Wilson, Sarah Silverman and Maluma in a Notting Hill-style love story Marry Me. LAUREN TAYLOR finds out more.
JENNIFER Lopez did not have to look far for inspiration for her character in new rom com Marry Me. She plays pop superstar Kat Valdez, half of a hot power couple with fiance Bastian (Colombian musician Maluma in his film debut), who suffers public heartbreak and humiliation — all played out on social media.
“This wasn’t a role where I had to research what it was like to be a famous recording artist,” says Lopez, 52. “I think there’s a lot of us in each other.
“The difficult part was the idea of showing what it’s really like inside my bedroom when something goes wrong and you suffer heartbreak like this in front of the whole world, and the media goes to town on you,” says the Love Don’t Cost A Thing singer.
As their hit duet Marry Me climbs the charts, Kat and Bastian plan to wed in front of thousands of fans and stream it across the world, but she discovers he is cheating on her moments before the on-stage ceremony.
Social media — and how celebrity news spreads on it — is a big theme of the film too, “Which can be, you know, just as, if not more anxiety provoking for people in the public eye,” she says.
Lopez, who is also a producer on the film, has seen the prominence of social media really change over her expansive music and film career since she released her first single If You Had My Love in 1999. “So you have that element in [the film], of what that’s like to have a heartbreak and a huge embarrassment in front of the world, and how it travels so quickly,” she says.
“[Now, with social media] there’s no doubt that if something happens, somebody’s going to see it, they’re going to get it on camera, they’re going to talk about it, they’re going to share it — and navigating that as a person in the public eye can be tricky, especially when difficult things happen in your life.”
Owen Wilson, 53, stars alongside Lopez as divorcee maths teacher Charlie Gilbert, who happens to have been dragged
along to Kat’s concert by friend Parker (Sarah Silverman) — a “Marry Me” sign thrust into his hands. With plans to exchange wedding vows on stage in ruins, the superstar picks Charlie out of the crowd to say “yes” to instead.
What starts as a crazy leap of faith turns into an unlikely love story between an everyman and a superstar in the ultimate test of the theory “opposites attract”.
So does Wilson believe in that? “In terms of your spirit, I think there has to be some sort of overlap either in humour or the way you look at the world, what you’re curious about or sense of adventure — you need to have a little bit of overlap for that attraction to work,” he muses.
Released in time for Valentine’s Day, Lopez describes her own perfect Valentine’s as “just me and my partner alone (she rekindled her romance with Ben Affleck in 2021 after their broken engagement in 2003) in a place where we don’t have to worry about people watching us, where we can have private moments and really talk about life and love and just really appreciating the company”.
Lopez cemented her place as the queen of romantic comedies in the early Noughties, with Maid In Manhattan and The Wedding Planner, and she describes her newest venture Marry Me as a “homecoming” to the genre (her second of the year – Shotgun Wedding lands this summer).
As a movie-goer, she says, she loves them: “When Harry Met Sally or Prelude To A Kiss… the Meg Ryan era and Julia Roberts, all of those movies are what I grew up on.”
The ‘hopeless romantic’ character is probably what filmgoers associate with Lopez the most. She recalls a scene where Wilson’s character asks Kat, “Don’t you want to give up on the whole love thing?” Lopez, who has been engaged five times and married three, resonates her character’s philosophy on the matter.
“I understand that, like no, if there’s a one in a billion chance, no matter what the numbers are, that’s worth it. There were a lot of
moments where I was able to bring a truth to the character in an emotional [sense] that was really authentic and real,” she says.
Naturally, music is a huge part of the film; Lopez recorded the soundtrack alongside filming and Maluma, 28, features on it too. Although he admits being “a bit nervous” about his first film, he says Lopez gave him a pep talk. “When I was there with Jennifer she was like, ‘Yo, we’re gonna do this, you’re gonna kill it.”
It meant a lot for him to “bring my Latino culture to the movie” alongside his singing and acting. “This main character, Bastian, is from Latin America, and it doesn’t happen often. It was pretty important to show the world that we, as Latin people, feel proud of it, and we can make it in the big screen too.”
Wilson was not brought on to the movie for his musical talents though. “I’m not on the soundtrack for for this movie,” he says, dryly. “I did actually have a song on Starsky & Hutch (2004, with Ben Stiller) and I remember that was a real challenge for the producer. He said that I broke three auto tune machines.”
Director Kat Coiro, hot off the heels of Netflix’s Dead To Me, says she wanted to make a “good oldfashioned rom com” and instead of reinventing the wheel they leaned into it.
“We’ve got references to Pretty Woman, we have people running through airports and holding up signs. I love that, I want people to look at it and go, ‘Oh, this is familiar to me’.”
A lot of people have said that the central love story is a “weird pairing”, she says. “I love that it’s a weird pairing!
“It’s got a very positive message about the power of love and finding love when you least expect it, and just breaking your patterns and changing things up and doing something unexpected.”
❐ Marry Me is Showing now in UK & Ireland cinemas