‘STORY’ TIME
EVEN J.Lo can’t always get what J.Lo wants. One of the most telling — and humbling — moments of Jennifer Lopez’s new Prime Video documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” finds the Bronxborn diva getting rejections from an array of A-listers to appear in “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story.” If you haven’t been keeping track, that is the short film that was released (also on Prime Video) in mid-February as the companion to “This Is Me… Now,” the singer’s first studio album in 10 years.
Everyone from Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande to Jennifer Coolidge and Lizzo — even freakin’ Snoop Dogg — turned down La Lopez for a variety of reasons.
But the 54-yearold superstar is smart enough to know that some “no’s” — those that come with politely crafted excuses — are more like “no way’s!”
“When an actor doesn’t like a script and doesn’t think it’s good enough or is worried about it, that’s what they’ll say,” Lopez says in the doc, which goes inside the making of both the “This Is Me… Now” album and short film. “I know that. I’ve done it.” Still, Lopez didn’t get to be one of the true pop-culture icons of her generation — from music to movies — by not earning some clout along the way. And so she hustled to get the likes of Trevor Noah, Post Malone and Sofia Vergara to appear in “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story” — not to mention her former co-stars Keke Palmer (“Hustlers”) and Jane Fonda (“Monster-in-Law”).
But there was one celeb who didn’t want to hop on Jenny’s block — “In the Heights” star Anthony Ramos — for a more honorable reason: out of his loyalty to Lopez’s third husband, Marc Anthony.
“Anthony Ramos was gonna do this,” Lopez reveals during a rehearsal.
“He was gonna do the ‘Rebound’ number with me,” she continues, referencing a song from her new album. “And he was like, ‘Ah, I’m friends with Marc.’ ”
The song addresses being in a rebound relationship. And wouldn’t you know it: Lopez wed Anthony — the father of her 16-year-old twins Max and Emme — in 2004, just one year after her first engagement to husband Ben Affleck was famously called off in 2003.
The doc then depicts Lopez calling Ramos and saying, “I didn’t know that you and Marc were, like, good friends … Well, that’s nice.”
She then goes on to assure Ramos — who co-starred with Anthony in the 2021 big-screen adaptation of “In the Heights” — that she would never call out “the father of my kids” like that.