Jennifer Lopez sat down with Howard Stern for his SiriusXM show for a wide-ranging conversation that covered her famous exes, the swirl surrounding Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl Halftime Show and her new movie, Kiss of the Spider Woman.
It was a dishy interview that continued to deliver the goods when Stern asked the superstar performer if she ever turned down a movie role only to regret it later. “Adrian Lyne offered me Unfaithful,” Lopez confirmed, citing the filmmaker’s 2002 steamy thriller that followed the unraveling of a suburban couple’s marriage when the wife indulges in an adulterous fling. Richard Gere and Diane Lane toplined as the couple, with Olivier Martinez playing her lover. Michelle Monaghan also starred in the Fox 2000 Pictures and New Regency Productions project, which earned $119 million worldwide.
When Stern asked Lopez why she turned it down, she chalked it up to the writing. “The script wasn’t good,” she said of the film, penned by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. and based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 original film La Femme Infidéle. But despite the script, she added, Lyne “made it great.”
Adding insult to injury, Lane snagged a best actress Oscar nomination for her work in the film in a category that also included Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven), Salma Hayek (Frida) and Renee Zellweger (Chicago).
“Is that hard to live with?” Stern asked about Lane’s Oscar nomination, to which she responded, “It’s funny. It haunts me. It haunts me a little bit. It’s like the one that I turned down that it was just like, ‘Why did you turn down working with Adrian Lyne? What were you thinking?’ I didn’t even know what the hell was going on in my mind at the time. Who knows what was going on with me at the time.”
At the time, Lopez was juggling a red hot music and acting career that featured recent releases like 2001’s The Wedding Planner with Matthew McConaughey and Angel Eyes with Jim Caviezel. Around the time Unfaithful was released, she had such films as Enough, Maid in Manhattan and Gigli, the latter of which proved to be one of the biggest box office disappointments in her career.
But she may have a chance to get some shine from the Academy next year as she’s already generating Oscar buzz for her supporting turn in Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. See Lopez on Stern below.
