Ahead of the streaming launch of the wrestling film “Unstoppable,” Jennifer Lopez joined the Variety Screening Series offered by Amazon MGM Studios for a profession retrospective chat with Clayton Davis, Variety’s Senior Awards Editor. Lopez shared her expertise taking over the function of a mom who raised well-known wrestler Anthony Robles, performed by Jharrel Jerome, and the movies from her profession which have made the best influence.
When Lopez first heard in regards to the script, she liked that it was a Latino story.
“But I also love that it was inspirational with very complex characters,” Lopez stated. “Judy herself was a very inspirational woman. You see this champion, you see this very extraordinary person in Anthony Robles but without his mother, he would not have been that person.”
Lopez mirrored on a few of her earlier roles, together with her flip as a stripper in “Hustlers” that garnered awards buzz. Going again all the best way to 1997 with “Selena,” Lopez acknowledged how she knew instantly that taking part in Selena Quintanilla-Pérez can be a “huge responsibility.”
She added, “I actually didn’t know Selena’s music before then. I wasn’t into Spanish music as much so I didn’t know her … I remember seeing her funeral pictures and all the people that showed up and I was like, ‘Whoa. What is this?’ I just knew there was this big role, which there never was a big role for a young Latin girl to be the lead in a film.”
Similar to how Lopez was in a position to connect with her character in “Unstoppable” as a mom, she noticed that Selena and her “had similar hearts” as dancers.
“I understood her joy,” she stated. “I would watch her on stage and her dancing and I was like, ‘She’s just doing it.’ There’s no choreography, there’s nothing … There’s just joy, singing, dancing, feeling, there’s so much about her. I didn’t even realize at the time I would go on to make 10 or 11 albums. I was just at the beginning of my acting career.”
Reflecting again on the movies she’s been in over time, Lopez sees a universality to the most effective sorts of tales.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from,” she stated. “Because while you can put [‘Unstoppable’] under a sports story, it’s not, it’s more of a family story. It’s really about these two people and the bond between this mother and son.”