Jennifer Lopez & Sterling K. Brown Have This Fun Nickname For Simu Liu After Watching Him Play Villain In ‘Atlas’

Talk about a dynamic trio!

Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown and Simu Liu star in “Atlas,” Netflix’s latest film that follows Jennifer’s character, Atlas Shepard, who is a brilliant data analyst with a major distrust in artificial intelligence, who joins a mission to capture a renegade robot. But when plans go awry, she has to place her trust into AI in order to save humanity.

And the person trying to kill Jennifer in the movie—Simu Liu!

Fans will get to see the Marvel star take on a villain in “Atlas,” and Sterling jokingly nicknamed him “Evil Simu” after seeing him take on the role. But while chatting with Access Hollywood, the “Barbie” star joked he wasn’t ready to go to the dark side.

“I just wanted to be in a movie with JLO. And they’re like no you’re trying to kill JLO, and I was like why would I want to kill JLO. Who would want to kill JLO?” he said.

All jokes aside, the 35-year-old admitted he enjoyed taking on a villain.

“You get to be a little bit more unhinged. You have to carry less of the weight of the story and so there’s less like obligatory good guy stuff that you have to do, you can just be evil, and bad and fun and it was a lot of fun getting to craft a character from the ground up,” he said.

But despite all the action, at its core Jennifer told Access it’s a love story.

“From the first time I read the script I cried,” she said. “I was just like ‘Wow, this is a really beautiful story’ because I felt like this character was so closed off and so traumatized and to see the journey she went on with Smith, who is not human, to kind of help her open up and to let him in and to trust somebody for the first time and she gets there with him. It was really beautiful to me, and it wasn’t typical.”

“Atlas” streams on Netflix May 24.