When Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together 18 years after calling off their 2003 wedding, it wasn’t just the rest of the world sent into a dizzy spin.
The singer herself said in a recent Australian radio interview that rekindling their romance was “never planned” but recalled in a separate chat that it felt momentous in 2021 when they saw each other in person again for the first time.
“When we came face to face for the first time in 18 years, it was quite a moment,” the 54-year-old told Aussie breakfast radio show Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie.
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When comedian Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli comically asked about the couple’s second “first kiss” all those years later, Lopez was coy.
“It was a moment, that’s all I’ll say, it was a moment,” she replied.
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The Can’t Get Enough singer was on the show to promote her first studio album in a decade, This Is Me… Now, and the companion musical movie This Is Me… Now: A Love Story.
While the music is inspired by the couple’s renewed romance “plot twist” – which J.Lo called a “miraculous twist of fate” – and 2022 wedding, she says their love story isn’t a fairytale.
“It’s the opposite of a fairytale,” she told the radio hosts.
“There was a lot of struggle and pain and self-realisation that had to happen for us to even get to a point where the universe would conspire to bring us back together in that way.”
Lopez, who funded the three-part multimedia project herself for a reported $US20 million ($30.1 million), said the highly-stylised fantasy film was made to show “the 18 year journey in between, to show what it took to get there”.
“I didn’t want to make the story of me and Ben, I think people knew that story – I wanted to tell the story of the kind of years between,” Lopez said.
As for Oscar-winner Affleck’s unusual role in the movie, as a newsreader on TV, Lopez said it was actually more meaningful than people might think.
“It was very metaphorical for the idea of somebody being in your life but not being in your life but always kind of being with you there,” she told Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie.
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“That idea of when somebody’s really marked you, in your heart and in your soul, and they’re always kind of in the back of your mind.
“So I wanted to create a character that was always there in the background but not really in her life.”
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story launches globally on Prime Video February 16, coinciding with the release of Jennifer’s new album This Is Me…Now.
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