Jennifer Lopez Reveals All Movie Musical Roles She Auditioned for and Lost Before ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’: “It Just Wasn’t the Right Time”
Fighting back tears and fresh from receiving the first of two standing ovations, Jennifer Lopez told a Sundance Film Festival audience on Sunday night that starring in Bill Condon’s movie musical Kiss of the Spider Woman made a lifelong dream come true. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of the world premiere at Park City’s Eccles Center Theatre, the superstar entertainer revealed that she had auditioned for some of Hollywood’s best known modern movie musicals, only to get passed over.
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“I remember auditioning for Evita, I remember auditioning for Chicago and for Nine — getting very close on Nine,” said Lopez, outfitted for the premiere in a very method ensemble, a glittering spiderweb gown by designer Valdrin Sahiti. “There was a lot of things that I had always hoped that I could do and just wasn’t the right time. But this is the right thing.”
1996’s Evita, which came just as Lopez was starting to break out from her In Living Color days to movie stardom via Selena a year later, starred Madonna and was directed by Alan Parker. Chicago, meanwhile, was penned by Kiss of the Spider Woman‘s Condon and directed by Rob Marshall. It starred Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere and went on to win six Academy Awards including best picture at the 2003 Oscars. The star-packed Nine, also directed by Marshall, featured Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren and Daniel Day-Lewis, among others.
In 2021, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Lopez had struck a deal with Skydance and Concord to develop original content like TV series and films based on the massive Concord catalog of musicals that includes the works of Rodgers & Hammerstein, among others. It was speculated at the time that the deal would find her fronting a major musical.
Though Lopez didn’t specify for which parts she auditioned, it’s not a surprise that she was in the running on such hot musical properties back in the day. Starring in a big-screen movie musical is a dream that dates back to childhood when she fell in love with West Side Story. She believed that Broadway would be her destiny.
“I started off loving musicals,” Lopez told THR. “That’s what made me want to be a singer and an actor and a dancer; watching musicals with my mom when I was growing up — me and my two sisters. We loved them and we’d sing around the house. I honestly thought I was going to go on to Broadway because I started as a dancer and a singer and I was doing tours in Europe and in Japan. I thought, OK, next step would be Broadway. Then I got sent out to Hollywood and the rest is kind of history, and [my career] took a different turn.”
For fact-checking purposes, Lopez said, “You can go back to interviews [of mine] when I was in my 20s talking about that. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. When [Bill Condon] sent me this, I almost couldn’t believe it. I was like, he wants me to do this? Or, I have to meet him? Does he want me to sing?”
The answer: All of the above. Based on the early reactions and reviews to Lopez’s performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman, she nailed the lifelong dream. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” said Lopez during the post-premiere Q&A inside the Eccles as she fought back tears at one point.
Spider Woman first started life as a 1976 novel by Argentinean author Manuel Puig, followed by a 1985 movie adaptation and finally a Tony-winning 1993 Broadway musical. The story focuses on two cellmates, Valentíno (Diego Luna), a political prisoner with hopes of overthrowing the dictatorship, and Molina (Tonatiuh), a queer window dresser convicted of public indecency. The two form a bond when, to pass the time, Molina recounts the plot of a Hollywood musical starring his favorite star, Ingrid Luna, played by Lopez, who also has a dual role as the film’s title character.
Not only does Lopez get the role of a lifetime in Spider Woman — Condon confirmed he wrote the part specifically for her — she also got the opportunity to perform a song by the show’s original composers John Kander and Fred Ebb. The track, “Never You,” was unearthed by Bill Condon who dug through the Kander archives.
“I found out today listening to Bill that he did the deep dive,” Lopez explained of the reveal which she learned during their Sundance press day. “I thought they had written this specifically for Kiss of the Spider Woman, but what he did was a deep dive into all the Kander and Ebb songs that they wrote that had never been heard and never been used. He found ‘Never You’ and put it in [the film], which was my favorite song. Oh my God — it’s such a beautiful song.”
Being the first performer to sing it on screen came with a “huge responsibility,” said Lopez, who revealed that Kander joined her in the studio when she recorded it. “It was amazing because he was sitting there — he is 97 years old — and I didn’t think he would come to the pre-records or any of the filming. He was just in tears listening to me sing, and it was just amazing. I couldn’t believe my life at that moment. It was a dream.”
Condon is aware that he helped her realize that dream even if he believes it should’ve happened sooner. “It’s a little bittersweet because you think, why have we been robbed of 25 years of Jennifer Lopez musicals? Partly because the genre has ebbs and flows. But I don’t think she has anything to prove after this. I hope it opens the door to a lot of other filmmakers who look at this and this other aspect of her talent and say, I want that. I want to explore that.”
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