Jennifer Lopez regrets turning down the 2002 film Unfaithful and the decision still “haunts” her.
In an interview with Howard Stern, the Hustlers star revealed that she was offered the role that eventually went to Diane Lane and earned her a best actress Oscar nomination, and explained why she turned it down.
Asked if there was a movie she had turned down and now regretted, Lopez said: “Yes. Adrian Lyne offered me Unfaithful.”
Asked why she turned it down, the actor answered: “The script wasn’t good, and then [Lyne] made it great. And Diane Lane got nominated for the Oscar.”
“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,” she continued. “Who knows what was going on with me at the time.”
Unfaithful stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane as a couple whose marriage is jeopardised after Lane’s Connie embarks on an affair with a stranger, played by Olivier Martinez, she meets by chance.
The erotic thriller was made on a $50m budget and went on to gross $119m at the box office.
It also earned Lane best actress nominations at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes.
Lopez has talked about turning down Unfaithful previously as well, telling Vanity Fair in 2020: “There was a movie called Unfaithful. And it was offered to me and the script, for me, wasn’t all the way there. I should have known that Adrian Lyne was going to kill it, but I didn’t. Diane Lane was so perfect for it, and it was obviously meant to be her, but when I think about that, I want to literally, like, shoot my toe off. I do.”
Lopez is currently on the press run for Kiss of the Spider Woman, a remake of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel of the same name.
Directed by Bill Condon, the movie is set in 1981 during Argentina’s Dirty War and follows Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) who fantasises about sharing a cell with actor Ingrid Luna (Lopez) to pass the days as he’s imprisoned with political activist Valentin Aregui (Diego Luna).
After being cast in the film, Lopez learned that Condon, who previously made musicals Chicago and Dreamgirls, had chosen to shoot scenes in one take, including its elaborate music performances.
“I was like, ‘F*** me! I better get it right then,’” she told Variety. “It was challenging. It was challenging in that way, time-wise, as independent films can be, right? Halfway through the take, it’s going perfectly and then you trip on your dress or whatever, so it’s like, maybe we start over.”
Despite being constrained by budget, time and prep while filming, Lopez said: “We put our heart and soul into it and we rehearsed like crazy for the time that we had and it was a beautiful thing.”
Kiss of the Spider Woman released in cinemas on 10 October.
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