Kiss Of The Spider Woman a childhood dream come true for Jennifer Lopez

LOS ANGELES – Jennifer Lopez was a professional dancer long before she became a famous actress and pop singer, appearing in music videos and on stage with artistes such as New Kids On The Block, MC Hammer and Janet Jackson in the 1990s.

But her early jobs also included dancing for Broadway musicals and revues. And she got to dust off those skills for her first movie musical, Kiss Of The Spider Woman.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Nov 6, the drama casts Lopez as the star of an old Hollywood musical whose plot is narrated by one prisoner to another to pass the time.

The film may have bombed when it opened in the United States in October, but critics praised Lopez’s performance, which some reviewers described as one of the best of her career.

For the 56-year-old American performer, the role was all her childhood dreams rolled into one.

“I’ve always wanted to do a musical. It’s been a dream of mine for so long,” Lopez said at a virtual press conference in early October.

Based on the 1976 novel of the same name by Argentinian writer Manuel Puig, as well as the 1992 stage musical it inspired, the movie was helmed by American writer-director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, 2006; Beauty And The Beast, 2017), who penned the script with Lopez in mind.

Her former husband, American actor and film-maker Ben Affleck, was a producer on the film.

“Bill sent me the script and I was blown away that it had all the things I imagined, when I was a little girl, that I wanted to do with my life – I got to sing, I got to dance, I got to act, I got to play a big Hollywood movie star,” says the actress, whose breakout role was in the musical biopic Selena (1997).

“And the script was so lovely,” adds Lopez, who also won acclaim for the crime caper Out Of Sight (1998) and comedy-drama Hustlers (2019). “It’s a love story and also this beautiful homage to how important movies are in our life.”

Kiss Of The Spider Woman is a movie within a movie, with the main story about two cellmates – gay window dresser Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) and political activist Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna) – imprisoned during Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1980s.

And Luis recounts the plot of a film in which an actress named Ingrid Luna (Lopez) plays both an heiress, Aurora, and a mythical being known as the Spider Woman.

Lopez enjoyed playing all three characters. “It was making them all just a little bit different, but the same in that we’re all searching for love.”

The star – who was behind chart-topping hits such as Love Don’t Cost A Thing (2000) and On The Floor (2011), and will return to Las Vegas in December for a series of solo concerts – is no stranger to dancing while singing. But the film’s choreography challenged her.

“I do a lot of my own shows and a lot of dancing, but I hadn’t done this type of dancing for years and years – kind of that musical theatre, jazz, technical Broadway style of dancing.

“And so it was challenging but so much fun. I loved every minute of it,” says Lopez, who has 17-year-old twins with her former husband, Grammy-winning American singer Marc Anthony, 57.

She took it in her stride when Condon – who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the period drama Gods And Monsters (1998) – insisted that each elaborate song-and-dance sequence be filmed in a single take.

“The choreographers were great – I sat in there while they were creating and I told them what I could and couldn’t do.

“‘Can you do it all in one take?’ Bill says. ‘Yes, I think so.’ And we did,” she says.