Jennifer Lopez Says Her New Movie “Wouldn’t Have Been Made” Without Ex Ben Affleck

“I told him, ‘This is a role that I was born to play.’”

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Jennifer Lopez is opening up about the pivotal role that her ex-husband Ben Affleck played behind the scenes of her new film, Kiss of the Spider Woman. Speaking on a recent episode of CBS News Sunday Morning, the “On The Floor” singer recalled a conversation with Affleck.

“I told him, ‘This is a role that I was born to play,’ and I wanted to do it, and he said ‘Okay,’ and he helped make it happen,” she said.

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Jennifer Lopez at the 2025 American Music Awards.

Lopez stars as Ingrid Luna in the musical-slash-movie and is also an executive producer, as is Affleck. Elsewhere in the interview, she readily acknowledged that the Air actor financed the project via his and Matt Damon’s production company Artists Equity.

“The movie wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for him and Artists Equity,” she said. “That is right, and I will always give him that credit.”

Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck in August 2024 after two years of marriage. Their highly anticipated nuptials came after a roller coaster love story that began all the way back in 2002, when the duo met on the set of Gigli.

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Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the premiere of ‘This Is Me…Now: A Love Story’ in 2024.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is far from the ex-couple’s first collaboration, of course. Last year, Damon and Affleck produced Lopez’s boxing biopic Unstoppable. The movie premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024.

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Jennifer Lopez at the premiere of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ at Sundance Film Festival.

This time around, Kiss of the Spider Woman premiered at Sundance Film Festival, with an emotional Lopez telling the press that she had been “been waiting for this moment my whole life.”

“When you talk about the importance of musicals, the reason that I even wanted to be in this business was because my mom would sit me in front of the TV… we’d come on once a year, West Side Story on Thanksgiving,” she said, per People. “I remember I was just mesmerized. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ That was always my goal. And this is the first time I actually got to do it. This crowd made my dream come true.”