Power bossness, second act and a-rod
Jennifer Lopez seizes the limelight
IT WAS supposed to be Jennifer Lopez’s day off. Cue visions of her lounging by her infinity pool in Belair. However, the multi-hyphenate performer, producer and branding maven, held a half-dozen business meetings in her home and had to forgo dinner with boyfriend Alex Rodriguez.
A gracious Bel-air mansion, complete with miniwaterfalls, fireplaces blazing in even empty rooms, and two bunnies that belong to Lopez’s 10-year-old twins, might seem an unlikely spot to transform into a C-suite.
But when Lopez moved in two years ago, she designed an office like a boardroom, complete with big conference table. It just happens to be next to the couture-filled space where she gets her hair and make-up done. And so she whisks in, half-dolled up, to present her opinions and outsize ideas, and she sells them: J. Lo Inc, in action.
And now, at the end of this non-day off, she strode over on
3cm glossy Louboutins, with the posture of an equestrian and a chief executive’s firm handshake, to crisply discuss how her latest movie, Second Act, fits into her new entrepreneurial strategy.
It all hinges on an acknowledgement of her power bossness.
Here’s what Lopez, 49, has recently come to realise: that J.
Lo – the artist, the brand, the astonishingly dewy face and buffed physique – is even more valuable than the entertainment industry has given her credit for.
Which is not to say she is after a bigger pay cheque 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 in her world who have experienced Hollywood inequity, what she is demanding, vocally all of a sudden, is her fair share.
That Lopez now openly mentions private equity as breezily as other actresses discuss character development may be thanks to Rodriguez, 43.
The Yankee-turned-sports commentator is a long-time investor with a sizeable real estate portfolio spread across 14 states, A-rod Inc. He had organised several of her meetings that day and some for himself.
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Their partnership – they’ve been blissfully dating for a year and a half – has given Lopez’s already bustling empire a new momentum.
“He just opened up our vision to other ways of doing business,” she said, “that were not only more lucrative but gave us more freedom, gave us more control over our own image and our own ideas, instead of giving them away.”
She was in a sitting area near her breakfast nook, propped up by a fleet of white throw pillows stitched with inspirational sayings: “Life is short, live your dream and share your passion”.
Due to open in cinemas on December 14, Second Act, the movie Lopez stars in and produced with her company, Nuyorican Productions, is built on a similar self-help-y maxim: “The only thing stopping you is you.” Lopez plays Maya de la Vargas, a 40-year-old assistant manager at a Queens big-box store whose life hasn’t unfolded as she imagined and who now dreams of better opportunities usually not afforded to 40-plus women of colour. The story dovetailed with Lopez’s worldview that your status early on doesn’t necessarily determine your future, but your attitude does.
No one bet that the Bronx dancer who started as a Fly Girl on In Living Colour in 1991 would go on to become a powerhouse Hollywood entertainer and retail mogul. “She’s one of the most powerful brands on the planet,” Rodriguez said.
He said she’s sold several billion dollars in consumer goods, with nearly $2 billion (R27bn) grossed in fragrances alone; her best-selling Glow line jump-started the contemporary market for celebrity scents.
“She has over 150 million followers on social media, and over 75% of those are millennials,” Rodriguez added.
“She’s able to see around corners and connect with the masses at a level that I’ve never seen anyone connect with.”
The movie, which co-stars Lopez’s real-life BFF Leah Remini as her on-screen BFF and Milo Ventimiglia as her (ahem) itching-to-get-hitched baseball manager boyfriend, puts Lopez back in the sights of the kind of broad fare that cemented her stardom: romcoms about strivers from the wrong side of the tracks who move (or rather, marry) up. Second Act is more of a workplace comedy, with a dramatic family sub plot; for once, the relationship is secondary to the character’s evolution, which Lopez loved.
“The thing is her,” she said.
“She realises 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 description lifted from her 2014 memoir, True Love, in which she chronicled the tumultuous year after she announced her divorce from singer Marc Anthony, father of her daughter, Emme, and son, Max, and did her first international concert tour.
At Remini’s urging, she went to therapy. “I discovered I had low self-esteem, which I had never really pictured myself as having,” she wrote.
“And she realised that she didn’t prioritise her own needs enough, compared with those of the men in her life; growing up, she’d internalised some Cinderella fantasies. When Emme suggested not long ago that she might not get married, Lopez took it as a parental victory: “I’ve always been trying to tell her, love yourself. You don’t need anybody to complete you.
“She don’t need no fairy tale.”
That could be a message of Second Act, too. But it also glosses over the institutional and social hurdles that a character like Maya might face.
“There is racism. There is sexism. There is ageism. There is all of this, and you know what, that’s still not going to stop me,” she said. “I believe that 100% to the bottom of my soul.” The hustle instilled in her, as one of three daughters of a computer technician and a kindergarten teacher, has served her well professionally. She was wilfully positive.
“She has her fingerprints on everything,” Goldsmith-thomas said.” Her 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door, one of only a few movies she’s appeared in since 2012 and the first produced by her production company, Nuyorican, received poor reviews but earned more than $52 million on a budget of a reported $4m.
For Lopez, a turning point came in 2011, when she signed on as a judge for the American Idol, when the public had cooled on her supposed diva reputation earned in the years of Bennifer (her failed engagement to Ben Affleck).
Between therapy and reality TV were the epiphanies that brought her to a new awareness of her cultural clout to her recently concluded Las Vegas concert residency when she earned a record $1.43m in ticket sales on one night and danced her famous butt off for three years, to her energised business mindset and to A-rod.
Medina, who has known Lopez for more than 20 years, said that with this romance, “we’re experiencing a new version of Jennifer Lopez”.
Rodriguez has counselled Lopez to go “narrow and deep” with her projects to do less but own more. “We’re in the trailblazing business, we’re in the break-down-the-walls, kick-the-glass-ceiling business,” he says. | The New York Times