The lowdown on J Lo
With a new film Second Act, Jennifer Lopez talks about maximising her opportunties in life, love and business
Jennifer Lopez started off as a dancer, but is now a singer, actor and entrepreneur. With her latest film Second Act due in early 2019, she tells Melena Ryzik how, after years of helping make billions of dollars for other people, she is determined to realise her true worth.
It is supposed to be Jennifer Lopez’s day off. Cue visions of her lounging by her infinity pool in Bel-air, friends hanging, tunes turned up. Instead, Lopez, the multihyphenate performer, producer and branding maven, is holding halfa-dozen business meetings in her Los Angeles home, from early morning until sundown, on ambitious ventures ranging from real estate to fitness.
A studio head is there, some developer types, marketing people, her TV and film producing partner, her manager and Alex Rodriguez, her boyfriend. The couple are hoping to have dinner together, but “you see what goes on around here,” she says, unapologetically, as they go over the day’s agenda.
A gracious Bel-air mansion – complete with miniwaterfalls (yes, plural), fireplaces blazing even in 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 nonday off, she strides over on four-inch glossy Louboutins, with the posture of an equestrian and a CEO’S firm handshake, to crisply discuss how her latest movie, Second Act, fits into her new entrepreneurial strategy. It all hinges on an acknowledgment 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 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 in her world who have experienced Hollywood inequity, what she is demanding, vocally all of a sudden, is her fair share. “I want what I deserve,” she says.
To hear her tell it, that stance has been hard-won. Over the past few years, as a divorced parent, she took painstaking stock of her trajectory and decided she could level up.
“Understanding my own worth and value as a person made me understand it differently in my work, as well,” she says. It “has been a long journey for me. And so I’m very proud to stand in the shoes of, yes, I think I do deserve more. All artists do deserve more. We are the scarce asset. They can’t do anything without us. They have no product. So we have to understand that.”
That Lopez now openly mentions private equity as breezily as other actresses discuss character development may be thanks to Rodriguez, 43. The baseball starturned-sports commentator is a longtime 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.
Their partnership – they’ve been blissfully dating for a year and a half and are the furthest thing from shy about proclaiming it – has given Lopez’s already bustling empire a new momentum, she and her partners agree. “He just opened up our vision to other ways of doing business,” she says, “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 is 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,” “Start each day with a grateful heart,” “My favourite place in the world is next to you,” etc, etc. You’ve seen them all at a home goods store near you. More of the same messaging adorns the walls and tables. “You can’t touch music, but music can touch you,” reads the ceramic dish in front of me. These are not just totems of cosying décor. Lopez, a devotee of motivational author Louise Hay, believes deeply in the power of daily affirmations and speaking the success you want into the world. (And if intoning “I am youthful and timeless” is responsible for her look, Goop should worry, especially because Lopez is also starting a skincare line.)
Out next month in the UK, 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-yearold assistant manager at a Queens big-box store whose life hasn’t unfolded as she imagined and who now dreams of better opportunities – 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 Color in 1991 would go on to become a powerhouse Hollywood entertainer and retail mogul.
To anyone who has crossed paths with Lopez since, her determination is unmissable. “She is the master of shattering the word ‘no,’” Rodriguez says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He reels off her career transitions – dancer to actor, actor to singer, to producer, to businesswoman, opposition at each step. “She keeps breaking through,” he says, sounding awed. “She’s one of the most powerful brands on the planet.”
He’s a stats guy, so he has the maths to back it up: over the past few decades, he says, she’s sold several billion dollars in consumer goods, with nearly $2 billion grossed in fragrances alone; her bestselling Glow line jump-started the contemporary market for celebrity scents. “She has over 150 million followers on social media, and over 75 per cent of those are millennials,” Rodriguez continues. “She’s able to see around corners and connect with the masses at a level that I’ve never seen anyone connect with. She innately has that DNA that understands how to land her points. That’s just maybe being a great communicator.”
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: romantic comedies about hypercompetent strivers from the wrong side of the tracks who move (or rather, marry) up. It was developed and co-written by Elaine Goldsmiththomas, Lopez’s producing partner, who conceived it before the two even began working together. She was also a producer of Maid in Manhattan, Lopez’s 2002 blockbuster.
Second Act is more of a workplace comedy, with a dramatic family subplot; for once, the relationship is secondary to the character’s evolution, which Lopez loves. “The thing is her,” she says. “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, too. “I discovered I had low selfesteem, 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 adds: “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. To Lopez, that is another instance where mind-over-matter determination should prevail. She was a Puerto Rican from the middle-class Bronx with aspirations far beyond that and a tenacity that made it happen. “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 says. “I believe that 100 per cent, 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. Nuyorican, the production company she founded nearly two decades ago, has lately been on an upswing, with TV series
(Shades of Blue, the NBC cop drama that she starred in for three seasons, until it ended in August; Good
Trouble, a spinoff of her Freeform family show The Fosters; and the popular reality series World of Dance, on which Lopez is a judge) and many movie projects in the works.
As I sit across from her, surrounded by tall orchids and bright roses, those aphoristic pillows start to seem really credible, especially with a phalanx of uniformed staff to clean and fluff them. Lopez is so radiant, she looks like she’s been Instagram-filtered. She is wilfully positive (happiness is “the choice I make every day”) but also bristles, in a relatable way, at how women have been forever discounted. In the Time’s Up era, “I really feel like we’re changing that,” she says.
Lopez has invested her own money in her projects, she says, and her longtime manager and business partner, Benny Medina, describes her spending hours fine-tuning a new music video with an editor. (She has the edit bay set up at her house.) She plans to direct a video – her first time behind the camera – for Limitless, the anthem Sia wrote and Lopez recorded for Second Act.
“She has her fingerprints on everything,” Goldsmith-thomas says. With a movie idea, “we talk about directors and writers and how we’re going to sell it.” Her 2015 thriller
The Boy Next Door, one of only a few movies she’s appeared in since 2012 and the first produced by Nuyorican, received poor reviews but earned more than $52 million on a budget of a reported $4 million.
In Hollywood, says Goldsmiththomas, who has been in the business for decades as an agent and studio head, “survival is about your ability to pivot.”
For Lopez, a turning point came in 2011, when she signed on as a judge for the then-top rated American Idol .She considered it a career resuscitation and a way to reintroduce herself to a public that had cooled on her supposed diva reputation, earned in the years of Bennifer and contract riders demanding all-white dressing rooms. With Idol, “people were saying they liked me, which made me realise how many years I’d spent thinking they didn’t, and that affected how I felt about myself,” Lopez wrote in her book. (Bennifer, her failed engagement to Ben Affleck, seems like a tabloid eon ago but exacted a heavy emotional toll; she wed Anthony in the aftermath.) Her fiveseason tenure on Idol “was the first time in a long time that I felt good about just being me,” she wrote.
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 $1.43 million in ticket sales on one night and danced her famous butt off for three years; to her energised business mindset; to A-rod.
Medina, who has known Lopez for more than 20 years, says that with this romance, “the personal confidence and comfort level has risen to a high that I’ve never seen before. We’re experiencing a new version of Jennifer Lopez.”
The couple post first-blush-of-love messages about the other constantly. Both have been burned by the public lens on their love lives before but view this era of social media differently: “We’re just solid,” Lopez says, and sharing that feels natural. Rodriguez says it is “a chance to have a direct-toconsumer control of your narrative.”
His guidance on her work, she says, started with discussions of his investments, mostly owned, versus her licensing deals, which always “felt imbalanced to me,” she says. “How did I help these people make a billion dollars and I came home with this very small fraction of that? Should I not have participated in that since it was my name, my idea, my product?” Rodriguez, who took business classes at Columbia University and counts Warren Buffett as a mentor and friend, has counselled Lopez to go “narrow and deep” with her projects – to do less but own more.
Lopez says she hopes 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 adds. “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.”