Jennifer Lopez Didn’t Get Paid to Star in Hustlers
Jennifer Lopez has brought us many amazing moments. Hustlers. Selena. "Jenny From the Block." That scene in Out of Sight. The Dress (and Google Image Search, which was invented because of The Dress.) Point is, GQ’s 2019 Icon of the Year has made her mark on God’s green earth. So we asked her to tell us about the biggest moments of her 20-years-and-counting career, from her star-making turn as Selena Quintanilla-Perez in Selena to her show-stopping performance as Hustlers’ leading lady, Ramona.
In particular, that she didn't get paid to do the movie. At least, not up front. “I didn’t get paid a whole bunch of money for Hustlers,” she swears. “I did it for free and produced it. Like Jenny From the Block—I do what I love.”
And people responded: "It became a movement," Lopez explains in the video. "This is our movie, where we run shit. They know it's all women producers, woman director, woman writer, all women starring in it. We've been watching men take advantage of women in movies for a long time, so it was a fun ride to see the tables turned."
That kind of bet-on-herself confidence marks most of Lopez's biggest moments, at least in the way she talks about them. Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight “marked leading-lady status for me," she says. And even though El Cantante, the 2006 musical biopic she produced and co-starred in with her then husband, Marc Anthony, didn't light up the box office, Lopez thinks it was overlooked. “It's a very difficult thing for a real-life couple to play on-screen and be convincing as a character. And he was so convincing as Hector Lavoe and I was so convincing as his wife," she says. "And just because it was a low-budget movie and we didn’t have the money to market it and promote it in the right way, it got overlooked a little bit.”
Watch J.Lo talk about all that, plus how she prepared to play Selena, the story behind The Dress, and why she joined American Idol:
Jennifer Lopez Breaks Down Her Biggest Career Moments
As a movie icon, a global pop icon, and an internet-melting fashion icon, nobody owned 2019 quite like Jennifer Lopez.
Meet 2019’s best of the best.
Originally Appeared on GQ
