Jennifer Lopez covers the latest issue of Interview, to promote her supporting role in Unstoppable. Nikki Glaser interviewed her soon after the Toronto Film Festival, so this is basically J.Lo’s first big interview since everything fell apart over the spring and summer. She canceled her tour, her marriage to Ben Affleck crashed and yet, she still rises. Jennifer surprised me a few times in this piece – she says she’s not looking to jump into the next relationship and she’s not even looking. She also talks about learning how to be kind to herself and understanding that she doesn’t have to be “perfect” to be loved. Some highlights:
Her struggle with low self-esteem: “My whole life has been proving my enoughness. Dealing with feeling like you’re enough, from when you’re very young, is something that you don’t figure out for a long time, because you’re not looking at yourself like that. Something is driving you and your decisions and you don’t know why. You start going, “Wait a minute, what the f–k is going on here?”
How everything started: “It was just being ignored, being a middle child, having a very outgoing mom and a dad who worked all day and worked all night and feeling like you weren’t important, like you weren’t a priority. That embeds in you, and I think your parents are doing the best they can. Even now being a parent, I have much more empathy for what they’ve been through. I love my parents, but I do see the effect of who they were and how they were raised, on me. You don’t even really know until those things start manifesting in your actual adult relationships. “Oh, I’m comfortable with this person ignoring me. I’m comfortable with this person treating me this way or that way.” That, for me, has been a journey.
Learning how to accept herself: “Again, it’s not until you go through incredibly hard moments and huge disappointments that you never could have imagined, that these things start becoming crystal clear. But the journey for me started probably when I had my kids, and that was 16 years ago. You start slowly chipping away at different things—“This is not right and this is not right”—and learning how to be on your own, and you start putting the pieces together and then you think, “Oh, I did it! I’ve got it!”
Her world exploded: “With This Is Me … Now and the project that you mentioned earlier, I felt like, whoa, I got here. I’m good. I did all the work and look at where I am, and then it was like my whole f–king world exploded.
You’re never really healed, you never figure out everything: “It’s a lifelong process. I think that’s what I love about life, that there’s no arrival point. There’s only getting better and growing if you want to. It’s either growing or dying, and I don’t want to do the dying part. And yeah, there’s times when I thought I figured it out, and then life goes, “Let’s send you another thing and see if you fall for it. Let’s see if you really have learned that lesson.” And I hadn’t. I understand that now in a much deeper way, which doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes in the future, but again, when your whole house blows up, you’re standing there in the rubble going, “How do I not ever let that happen again?” And then you start examining it little by little saying, “Okay, I did this, this was my part in it, this was what I should have seen early on, this is what I didn’t look at.” Those things are what really are the lessons.
Being good on her own: “You have to be good on your own. I thought I learned that, but I didn’t. And then, this summer, I had to be like, “I need to go off and be on my own. I want to prove to myself that I can do that.” Yes, it’s f–king hard! It feels lonely, unfamiliar, scary. It feels sad. It feels desperate. But when you sit in those feelings and go, “These things are not going to kill me,” it’s like actually, I am capable of joy and happiness all by myself. Being in a relationship doesn’t define me. I can’t be looking for happiness in other people. I have to have happiness within myself. I used to say I’m a happy person, but was still looking for something for somebody else to fill, and it’s just like, “No, I’m actually good.”
It’s not about raising the bar for the next person: “There’s no new bar because I’m not looking for anybody. How’s that?… You know what? For people who are romantics and love being in relationships and want to grow old with somebody, we think, “I have to have that to be whole and happy.” And you don’t.
On all of the social media chatter: “What matters for me, as an artist, is doing work that inspires me and that I enjoy doing, whether it’s a huge commercial success or something that only touches one person that nobody ever f–king even sees. It doesn’t matter. This is my life’s passion. I love to sing. I love to dance. I love to act. I love to entertain. I love to create. And anything anybody could say about me—and please don’t get me wrong, if I see something that’s hurtful, I’m not Teflon.
This interview says to me that she’s still standing, she’s still processing, she’s still learning about herself after her relationship with Ben Affleck imploded for a second time. She’s like… oh, I didn’t really learn those lessons, I accidentally made the exact same mistakes twenty years later. I like what she says about giving herself a break while simultaneously doing the work to do better. I also really hope she’s telling the truth about not looking for anybody. Usually she jumps from relationship to relationship because she can’t be alone with herself and her thoughts. It feels like she broke that curse this year.
@InterviewMag 55th Anniversary Issue pic.twitter.com/YBe8c2pwzw
— jlo (@JLo) October 9, 2024
Cover courtesy of Interview.