Ahead of the streaming release of the wrestling movie “Unstoppable,” Jennifer Lopez joined the Variety Screening Series presented by Amazon MGM Studios for a career retrospective chat with Clayton Davis, Variety’s Senior Awards Editor. Lopez shared her experience taking on the role of a mother who raised famous wrestler Anthony Robles, played by Jharrel Jerome, and the films from her career that have made the greatest impact.
When Lopez first heard about the script, she loved that it was a Latino story.
“But I also love that it was inspirational with very complex characters,” Lopez said. “Judy herself was a very inspirational woman. You see this champion, you see this very extraordinary person in Anthony Robles but without his mother, he would not have been that person.”
Lopez reflected on some of her previous roles, including her turn as a stripper in “Hustlers” that garnered awards buzz. Going back all the way to 1997 with “Selena,” Lopez acknowledged how she knew right away that playing Selena Quintanilla-Pérez would be a “huge responsibility.”
She added, “I actually didn’t know Selena’s music before then. I wasn’t into Spanish music as much so I didn’t know her … I remember seeing her funeral pictures and all the people that showed up and I was like, ‘Whoa. What is this?’ I just knew there was this big role, which there never was a big role for a young Latin girl to be the lead in a film.”
Similar to how Lopez was able to connect to her character in “Unstoppable” as a mother, she saw that Selena and her “had similar hearts” as dancers.
“I understood her joy,” she said. “I would watch her on stage and her dancing and I was like, ‘She’s just doing it.’ There’s no choreography, there’s nothing … There’s just joy, singing, dancing, feeling, there’s so much about her. I didn’t even realize at the time I would go on to make 10 or 11 albums. I was just at the beginning of my acting career.”
Reflecting back on the films she’s been in over the years, Lopez sees a universality to the best kinds of stories.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from,” she said. “Because while you can put [‘Unstoppable’] under a sports story, it’s not, it’s more of a family story. It’s really about these two people and the bond between this mother and son.”