Jennifer Lopez had her sights on landing the starring role in the 1996 movie adaptation of the musical “Evita.”
“I went to audition for ‘Evita’ for [director] Alan Parker,” Lopez said Wednesday night during a post-screening Q&A of her new movie musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” “I had been practicing for weeks and I sing my heart out and he goes, ‘You’re amazing. You know Madonna has the part, right?’”
Lopez laughed: “I said, ‘OK, bye-bye. Nice to meet you.’”
Now, Lopez is finally getting her movie musical moment in Bill Condon’s big screen adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” opposite Tonatiuh and Diego Luna.
Lopez plays Ingrid Luna, a movie star whose most famous role is that of a spider woman, capable of killing her lovers with a kiss. In 1981, during Argentina’s Dirty War, gay department store window dresser Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), who is serving a prison sentence, imagines her films to escape the horrors of his present day. He and political activist Valentin Arregui (Luna) become unlikely friends when they are forced to share a cell together.
Lopez said she had been dreaming of starring in a musical since she was a child after watching “West Side Story” on television in her family’s “little home in the Bronx.” She previously recalled also auditioning for musical movies “Chicago” and “Nine.” In 2016, she was announced to star in an NBC live production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” but the project was eventually scrapped.
Lopez recalled Condon, who also adapted the script for the film, telling her that the elaborate musical numbers in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” would be filmed in one take. “I was like, ‘We’ll do some coverage?’” she said. “He was like, ‘Nope, no coverage.’ I was like, ‘Fuck me! I better get it right then.’ Like 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. It was challenging. It was challenging in that way, time wise, as independent films can be, right? It’s the time, it’s the prep, it’s the, you know, budget. All of it were constraints for us.”
She continued, “But 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 and again, I’m living my childhood dreams.”
Tonatiuh introduced the screening before heading to the airport to hop on a plane back to New York for another work commitment.
Lopez received a standing ovation when she walked on stage for the Q&A.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” music is by John Kander and Fred Ebb and is based on the novel by Manuel Puig and the book of the musical by Terrence McNally. It premiered during Sundance in January.
While promoting his action thriller “Carry On” in December, Tonatiuh told me about working with Lopez. “She’s breathtaking and transformative in so many different ways. I remember there was a moment where we were rehearsing for the first time, and it was just a table read. She had the first line in it in one of the songs and she starts going full out,” he said. “I had my iPad and my glasses on thinking it would be a straight table read. I was like, ‘Oh, if we’re going full out, hold on.’ And I just remember Bill watching this and seeing his mind go to work.”
During the Wednesday Q&A, Condon said he and the casting department looked at about 800 people before choosing Tonatiuh.
After the screening, Lopez attended a reception at Chateau Marmont.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” from Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions and LD Entertainment, will be in theaters Oct. 10.