Why Jennifer Lopez Was 'Literally Sobbing' Reading the Script for Her Sci-Fi Film “Atlas” (Exclusive)

Jennifer Lopez’s “story about love and friendship,” the sci-fi thriller ‘Atlas,’ is on Netflix May 24

Jennifer Lopez’s connection to her new movie is out of this world. 

In a behind-the-scenes video from her sci-fi thriller Atlas, the movie’s leading actress and producer, 54, opens up about why its story resonated on such a deep level.

“The first time I read the script for Atlas, I felt very passionately about the story and particularly the friendship story at the core of it,” says Lopez in the clip, shared exclusively with PEOPLE. “At the end of it I was literally sobbing.”

On its surface, she adds, “it's kind of a big action movie, but it has at the emotional core a story about love and friendship.”

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Per the movie’s synopsis, Lopez plays Atlas Shepherd, “a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence.” After joining a “mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past,” her “only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.”

Directed by Brad Peyton and written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, the movie also stars Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Gregory James Cohan, Abraham Popoola, Lana Parrilla and Mark Strong.

“I always feel like the movies I do somehow mirror where I'm at in my life,” reflects the Hustlers star in the featurette. Atlas “helped push me forward into the next chapter.”

Her character, she continues, “is used to shutting out the world and going it alone. She learns that it's only by letting someone in — and that someone happens to be AI — that she can feel the pain from her past.”

Learning how “to take those walls down,” says Lopez, is “the bravest and most beautiful thing you can do for yourself and for others.”

Amid glimpses of both Lopez in character and shooting the film’s space sequences in front of green screens, she adds that her goal on Atlas was “making the best and most fun and emotionally grounded action film it could be.”

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This isn’t the first time Lopez has led a Netflix thriller, with last year’s The Mother becoming a hit for the streaming platform. Among her other recent projects was the album and companion movie project This Is Me…Now: A Love Story plus documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told.

Atlas is on Netflix May 24.

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