In 2022, Jennifer Lopez: Halftime came out. It’s worth a watch – J.Lo is very raw in the documentary, and there are some genuinely intimate moments caught on camera as she’s promoting Hustlers and preparing to perform at the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime show. She’s upset that Hustlers didn’t get any awards-season love, but she tried to just eat the pain and keep moving, and there’s a really sweet moment where she’s rehearsing for the Halftime show and Emme comes in and convinces Jennifer to check out the kids’ dance class next door (and that moment inspired an incredible visual in the halftime show).
I bring up Halftime because it’s one of my favorite celeb-documentaries in recent years, and I’m genuinely looking forward to watching her new doc, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. It’s supposed to be a companion piece to her new album (This Is Me… Now) and her musical film (This Is Me… Now: A Love Story). The musical was hilariously bad to me but others feel differently and so be it. But I will devour this doc, which comes out today. Jennifer let cameras into the home she shares with Ben Affleck and their kids, and cameras follow her around as she’s making the album and the musical film. It should be chaotic and TMI. Speaking of, here’s a little preview of coming attractions:
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s past relationship strife is water under the bridge. In her new Amazon Prime documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the “Waiting for Tonight” singer, 54, opens up about the ways in which she and the Air star, 51, have found harmony together after pressing pause on their relationship for nearly 20 years.
At one point, Affleck asks Lopez if she’s forgiven him, or is angry at him.
“I think I was angry at you for a long time,” she tells him in the doc. “But that heartbreak set both of us on a course to figuring ourselves out to being better people. I think I’ve forgiven you all the way. I think I need to forgive myself [for] some things.”
After meeting on the set of their movie Gigli in 2002, the pair were engaged later that year, and were set to be married in September 2003. But days before, they postponed the wedding, citing “excessive media attention.” After briefly splitting in the wake of the canceled nuptials, they officially called it quits in January 2004.
In the documentary, director Dave Meyers — who helmed This Is Me…Now: A Love Story — says that when Lopez and Affleck broke up, it was “catastrophic” — and the “On the Floor” artist explains that losing him was hard because he wasn’t just the love of her life, but her best friend.
In that sliding-doors situation of Ben not sabotaging the engagement and going through with the 2003 wedding… it would have been a completely different kind of heartbreak for both of them. They wouldn’t have survived as a couple for very long, and Ben would have had to scratch the sabotage itch in many other ways. As Jennifer Garner knows. There was always something to be said for coming back together in their late 40s/early 50s, at a point in their lives where the biggest self-sabotages are behind them. Hopefully. I guess I’m saying that I understand why J.Lo was mad at him for a while and why she’s not mad at him now. They both had to figure out a lot of their sh-t separately. And I’m still not convinced that they’ve figured everything out, but whatever. God bless. I’ll watch it.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Backgrid.