Jennifer Lopez, Leah Remini on revisiting working-class roots in 'Second Act': 'It's still who we are'
In the new comedy Second Act, Jennifer Lopez and Leah Remini play best friends from Queens who work together at a grocery store (that is, before a fake résumé lands Lopez’s entrepreneurial Maya a high-paying dream gig at skin care conglomerate).
The characters feel very much like who the working-class New York City natives could’ve been in a parallel universe had they not each skyrocketed to fame, Lopez as a dancer turned actress and singer and her longtime real-life friend Remini as comedy star of sitcoms like The King of Queens and Kevin Can Wait. And they’d agree with that assessment.
“These are not big stretches for us,” Remini told Yahoo Entertainment at the film’s Los Angeles press day (watch above).
“She was born in Brooklyn; I was born in the Bronx. We’re outer-borough girls. This thing takes place in Queens,” Lopez said, to which Remini added: “Our family and friends are these people. And it’s still who we are.” (Asked how her borough would feel about one of the Bronx’s most famous natives representing rival Queens, Lopez said, “I think they’ll be all right. I think so long as it’s New York, I get the pass.”)
Unlike Maya, Lopez and Remini aren’t looking for career changes.
“We’ve talked about this throughout years being together, what we’d want to do [if we left entertainment], and a lot of it has to do with doing nothing [laughs]. Being home, being with our families, being with our friends, and just kind of being,” Remini said. “But then we think about why you do what you do. … We do what we do because we want to affect somebody for the good, or we want to make somebody feel something. … But we also want to communicate our art. And we want to feel something and be moved. So it’s not 100 percent altruistic, because you get something back from it.”
Added Lopez: “Those are the greatest things in life. Where there’s an exchange and everybody wins. It’s fun what we do, and this movie’s fun.”
Second Act opens Friday. Watch the trailer:
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