Jennifer Lopez Reveals Advice Ben Affleck Gave Her When She Doubted Her Writing Abilities on “This Is Me...Now” Film

Jennifer Lopez's Amazon original 'This Is Me...Now: A Love Story' premieres on Feb. 16

Jennifer Lopez is baring her soul in her new cinematic original This Is Me…Now: A Love Story — and the star says it’s her real-life love story that helped push her to get it done.

Lopez and Dave Meyers, the project’s director, opened up about their ambitious new collaboration in a press conference on Thursday, during which the Marry Me star revealed how husband Ben Affleck helped quiet her doubts during production.

“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this.’ He was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are,’” she recalled Affleck telling her.

Lopez, 54, and Affleck, 51, tied the knot in July 2022 after rekindling their romance in 2021. They first dated for two years in the early 2000s before calling it quits just days before their 2004 wedding.

It was their renewed romance that inspired much of the original’s direction, Meyers said, noting one scene in particular that finds Lopez hard at work as a construction worker at a heart factory.

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“Metaphorically, it is true,” Meyers said. “That stemmed from her telling me the pain that she’s been in, specifically the pain that she went through when she broke up with Ben the first time. There was a lot of honesty that was shared in that first meeting, and so the heart factory became sort of a Titanic-level meltdown, which was a metaphor for what she was giving me as far as her truth.”

This Is Me…Now: A Love Story is a musical and visual reimagining of the life events that inspired Lopez’s upcoming album This Is Me…Now, which serves as a sequel to her 2002 album This Is Me…Then. The original includes a star-studded list of cameos, including Affleck, Post Malone, Fat Joe, Keke Palmer, Trevor Noah and Sofia Vergara.

At the press conference, Lopez said its origins lie in the album, and also in the fact that she feels the current moment in her life is “magical and even surreal at times.”

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“I went in the studio and I made this album, and when it was done, I just thought to myself, there’s more to this story,” she said. “There’s something bigger I want to do with this music. I don't know exactly what I want to do, which is kind of why I think we created something that hadn’t really been done, because it didn’t fit into any one specific category. Not quite a film, not quite a video, but a story nonetheless, something very original.”

Lopez said the ambitious project — which she funded herself, according to Meyer — has “started a new chapter” in her career, and marked a “turning point” in her life.

“It ended this 20-year journey about a lot of questions that I had about love and being myself, a hopeless romantic, and what it means to really enter into a kind of healthier, more self-accepting phase for myself,” she said. “Now what will happen from that, I hope, will be even more wonderful things that I have been so privileged to live up until this point.”

Lopez continued: “What the movie shows is that there has been struggles and there has been hard times that nobody knew about that I kept to myself, and gaining the confidence to be vulnerable and to admit certain things to the world has only made me more comfortable in my own skin and empowered me to step into this next phase of my life as an artist and as a human being.”

Though Lopez admitted that there were challenges along the way (“Every step of the way seemed to be a roadblock that we took as a challenge that turned into elevating it,” she explained), the final product is a unique experience that sets the project apart.

This Is Me…Now: A Love Story will premiere on Prime Video on Feb. 16.

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