Jennifer Lopez is dishing on her Met Gala look, her new movie “The Mother,” and what it’s really like being a mom to teenage twins!
“Extra’s” Terri Seymour caught up with J.Lo and her co-star Lucy Paez.
“It’s always fun,” Lopez said of fashion’s biggest night. “You get dressed up and you are Cinderella for a night and you go to the ball.”
She’s going into fierce mama bear mode for “The Mother,” starring alongside newcomer Lucy in her killer new role as an assassin trying to save the daughter she had to leave earlier in life.
“We have a great little movie and I’m excited about it,” Jennifer said. “It is actually not little! It’s a very big action movie.”
Terri asked her about the training, and Jen said, “I had to train. I was working out every day… I knew she was going to have a very kind of muscular physique. I wanted her to be lean… There was a whole mindset and mentality that this character had, and then I had to learn the fight sequences and the choreography for the big fights, learn how to use the knife, learn the rifle and the sniper stuff.”
She added, “It was fun. It was physical and it was so great to be able to do that and have a role like this at this time in my career.”
Did being a dancer help? She said, “Absolutely! Being a dancer helps with everything. Especially anything physical, anything with timing.”
Seymour asked Lucy what her initial reaction was when she found she would be co-starring alongside Lopez.
She answered, “Oh, my gosh… It was so surreal to me… I remember the audition. She was so powerful and taught me a lot.”
Lopez used her own experiences as the mother of 15-year-old twins Max and Emme to tap into her mama bear mode.
“I think instinctually we all have that thing where we want to protect our kids at all cost,” she explained. “And we don’t want anything to happen to them. This character takes that to the highest levels in the sense that she has to give up her kid to save her, and then she has to go back because she is in danger to protect her.”
She said of her kids, “It is funny, they are the same age as Lucy when I was filming… and it’s interesting because Lucy’s character Zoe really ends up challenging the mother in a lot of ways because she’s a teen… kind of teenagery.”
Jennifer got real about life at home with twin teens.
“In my own life, it was the same thing… [My] kids were at the age where they were kind of challenging the status quo and really kind of looking at you and now it’s not all hearts and flowers anymore, it’s kinda like… ‘Why are you telling me to do that? I don’t want to do that.’ Constantly the push and pull.”
Terri wondered who is more challenging, and J.Lo answered, “Both of them. They are both really smart, they’re both really loving and beautiful kids. But they’re also coming into their own and figuring themselves out and looking at their life and seeing what they love about it and what they don’t like about it and it is all you with them and everything about their life has to do with you. It’s challenging, those teenage years that everybody talks about, that they tell you about your whole life, that your mother still complains about me — ‘When you were a teenager!’ — and she’s right.”
And like everybody… Jennifer’s keeping Jamie Foxx in her thoughts during his challenging health crisis.
Terri mentioned, “I know you’ve known him for years — you go way back. Everybody is praying for him.”
Jennifer said, “Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I want him to have a quick and speedy recovery.”
“The Mother” premieres May 12 on Netflix.
