They say hindsight is always 20/20. Jennifer Lopez understands that now decades into a storied career in Hollywood. And if she could do it all over again, the 54-year-old actress would be a lot more picky.
In a new interview for ELLE‘s 2023 Women in Hollywood December/January issue — honoring nine remarkable women for their creative and cultural contributions to film, television, music and beyond — Lopez explains why she ultimately forged the path she did while coming up in Hollywood and why she would blow up that path and lay down an entirely new blueprint.
“One of those things was to be more particular with my choices. And I didn’t have that luxury, being Latina, I didn’t get called in for everything someone who wasn’t Latina would get called in for,” Lopez tells the women’s lifestyle magazine. “I got called in for very specific things.”
It’s true.
Lopez was a professional dancer before breaking into Hollywood, at first with small roles on TV before landing her first major movie role in 1995’s My Family, starring Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales, Constance Marie and Edward James Olmos. In the Gregory Nava-directed drama, Lopez played a young Maria Sánchez, for which she later received an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress.
That role catapulted her to greater heights, and she earned worldwide stardom when she was cast as the Queen of Tex-Mex music, Selena Quintanilla, in the 1997 biopic Selena. What’s interesting is that Nava also directed Selena, but Lopez found herself in the middle of a grueling audition process that reportedly included more than 20,000 actors auditioning for the title role. Ultimately, it was Selena’s mother, Marcella Ofelia Quintanilla, who cast the deciding vote.
Lopez would ultimately star opposite Ice Cube (Anaconda), George Clooney (Out of Sight), Matthew McConaughey (The Wedding Planner), Ralph Fiennes (Maid in Manhattan) and even her future husband, Ben Affleck (Gigli). She’d go on to launch a successful singing career in 1999 and was well on her way to becoming a box office queen.
It’s easy to see why Lopez, who next month releases her first album in almost a decade, is among those being honored by ELLE, which also includes Jodie Foster, America Ferrera, Lily Gladstone, Eva Longoria, Greta Lee, Danielle Brooks, Taraji P. Henson and Fantasia Barrino Taylor. Reflecting on a successful career at the box office, Lopez says she still would have done things differently.
“As I started getting more leads here and there, I should have pulled back. I took that mindset with me instead of going, ‘I should only work with certain kinds of directors that I really want to work with. I should choose this material in a different way,'” she explains. “I just wasn’t as particular as I could be, I think. And if I [could] start over, I think I would’ve done that. I would’ve known that the director is really the helm of the project when you’re acting.”
Just like singing, she says.
“The producers you work with are very important,” she continues. “I knew that with music, but I didn’t quite understand it as much when I was younger about directors.”
ELLE‘s 2023 Women in Hollywood December/January issue hits newsstands Dec. 19.
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