ROBYN BECK / Contributor
Jennifer Lopez Says Ben Affleck Was a ‘Reluctant Participant’ in Their ‘Bizarre’ New Documentary
Ben Affleck wasn’t so sure about wife Jennifer Lopez’s decision to share the raw details of their off-again-on-again love story in her new documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told.
Speaking about the “very scary” decision to produce the film, which was based on a series of once-private letters Ben, 51, wrote to her throughout their rocky relationship, Jennifer, 54, admitted that Ben was a “reluctant participant” in the film.
“I just said to him during one of the parts of the movie, I was like, ‘Is this weird?’” Jennifer explained during a Monday, February 26, screening of the documentary in Los Angeles. “He’s like, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I told him he was crazy, not me. But I know that I’m a crazy one. I get that part.”
Jennifer continued, telling her longtime producing partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas that she felt it was her responsibility as an artist to be “vulnerable.”
“You have to, even when you’re playing a role, have to get down to the real parts of yourself to share what it’s like to be human,” Jennifer explained. “And that is a scary thing to do.”
Despite her husband’s initial hesitation, Jennifer revealed that throughout the filming of the documentary, it was Ben who eventually encouraged her to share intimate details of their lives together.
“To be honest, when we started making the film, it just kind of got more and more bizarre and my husband, who had a front seat to the whole thing really, was the one who was like, ‘We should be capturing this,’ and he brought on this amazing team and that’s kind of how it happened,” she added.
The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which began streaming on Prime Video Tuesday, February 27, is only one part to J. Lo’s latest passion project about her relationship with Ben. The three-part multimedia project also includes a corresponding film and album, both titled This Is Me…Now, which were released in tandem on February 16.
The music component, which is a followup to her 2002 third studio album, This Is Me…Then, marks J. Lo’s first album release in nearly a decade. Her eighth studio album, A.K.A., was released in June 2014.
The $20 million self-funded project’s scripted film is described as a “narrative-driven odyssey” that “tells the story of Jennifer Lopez’s journey to love through her own eyes.” Its star-studded cast includes Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Sofía Vergara, Keke Palmer and, of course, Ben Affleck.
The critic consensus for the film, per the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, is that it is an “extravagant” love story for fans “seeking a dose of J. Lo at her most earnest and unrestrained.”
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