As Jennifer Lopez was working on her ninth studio album, she looked to her own life, including her decades-long and winding love story with husband Ben Affleck, for creative fodder.
“It was a moment in life that I wanted to capture, that seemed very kind of magical and even surreal at times,” she tells WHO as part of a global media event. “I went in the studio, and I made this album. And when it was done, I thought to myself, there’s more to this story, there’s something bigger I want to do with this music… it felt like there was a bigger message.”
The result is the tandem release of her 13-track album This Is Me…Now—a follow-up to her 2002 hit album This is Me… Then— as well as her new musical cinematic experience, This Is Me… Now: A Love Story. The 65-minute movie is a hyper-stylized account of her much-publicised personal life.
“There’s not a project that I’ve ever been involved with music or movies or anything that I didn’t put a bunch of my life into and a lot of my personal experience,” she says.
This new project, featuring cameos from Affleck as well as Trevor Noah, Kim Petras, Post Malone, Keke Palmer and Sofia Vergara, is a closer look at life through Lopez’s lens.
“There are parts of it that feel kind of very autobiographical, and then there’s parts of it that are kind of meta… That mix of it, being personal but also being able to be fantastical, surreal, magical is what I think makes it really kind of moving, entertaining, and at the same time, super real.”
Lopez’s love life has the highs and lows of the kinds of rom-coms that she’s become known for over the years. She first met Affleck as a co-star on the set of film Gigli while she was still married to her second husband, choreographer Cris Judd (she was previously wed to waiter-turned-actor Ojani Noa from 1997 to 1998).
Once Lopez split from Judd in June 2002, “Bennifer” was born. After their headline-grabbing romance buckled under the pressure of intense public interest, Affleck married actress Jennifer Garner in 2005, and they share three children – Violet, 18, Seraphina, 15, and Samuel, 11.
Lopez married singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and they had twins Max and Emme, now 15. She then dated her back-up dancer Casper Smart, and was engaged to baseball star Alex Rodriguez before finding her way back to Affleck.
The reunited couple tied the knot in a surprise Las Vegas wedding at midnight on July 16, 2022. The happy ending not only inspired Lopez’s new project, Affleck also helped boost her confidence and pushed her to finish the script for her movie.
“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this.’ He was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are,’” she tells WHO.
“It ended this 20-year journey about a lot of questions that I had about love and being myself, a hopeless romantic, and what it means to really enter into a kind of healthier, more self-accepting phase for myself… Gaining the confidence to be vulnerable and to admit certain things to the world, I think has only made me more comfortable in my own skin and empowered me in a way to step into this next phase of my life,” she continued. “As an artist and as a human being, that will be a whole new chapter for me.”
WHERE TO WATCH This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is now available on Prime Video, which coincides with the release of Jennifer’s new album This Is Me…Now.
She is also set to release on February 27, also on Prime Video, the candid documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which follows Jennifer Lopez as she undertakes the ambitious project of independently producing a new album and cinematic original.
Stream now on Prime Video with a 30-day free trial. Subscribe here.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
