Love is in the air

Jennifer Lopez did not have to look far for inspiration for her character in new rom com Marry Me. She plays pop superstar Kat Valdez, half of a hot power couple with fiancé Bastian (Colombian musician Maluma in his film debut), who suffers public heartbreak and humiliation – all played out on social media.

“This wasn’t a role where I had to research what it was like to be a famous recording artist,” says Lopez, 52. “The difficult part was the idea of showing what it’s really like inside my bedroom when something goes wrong and you suffer heartbreak like this in front of the whole world, and the media goes to town on you.”

As their hit duet Marry Me climbs the charts, Kat and Bastian plan to wed in front of thousands of fans and stream it across the world, but she discovers he is cheating on her moments before the on-stage ceremony.

Social media – and how celebrity news spreads on it – is a big theme of the film too, “Which can be, you know, just as, if not more anxiety provoking for people in the public eye,” she says.

Lopez, who is also a producer on the film, has seen the prominence of social media really change over her expansive music and film career since she released her first single If You Had My Love in 1999. “So you have that element of what that’s like to have a heartbreak and a huge embarrassment in front of the world, and how it travels so quickly,” she says.

“There’s no doubt that if something happens, somebody’s going to see it, they’re going to get it on camera, they’re going to talk about it, they’re going to share it – and navigating that as a person in the public eye can be tricky, especially when difficult things happen in your life.”

Owen Wilson, 53, stars alongside Lopez as divorced maths teacher Charlie Gilbert, who happens to have been dragged along to Kat’s concert by friend Parker (Sarah Silverman) – a “Marry Me” sign thrust into his hands. With plans to exchange wedding vows on stage in ruins, the superstar picks Charlie out of the crowd to say “yes” to him instead.

What starts as a crazy leap of faith turns into an unlikely love story between an everyman and a superstar in the ultimate test of the theory “opposites attract”.

So does Wilson believe in that? “In terms of your spirit, I think there has to be some sort of overlap either in humour or the way you look at the world, what you’re curious about or sense of adventure – you need to have a little bit of overlap for that attraction to work,” he muses.

Released in time for Valentine’s Day, Lopez describes her own perfect Valentine’s as “just me and my partner alone (she rekindled her romance with Ben Affleck in 2021 after their broken engagement in 2003) in a place where we don’t have to worry about people watching us, where we can have private moments and really talk about life and love and just really appreciating the company”.

Lopez cemented her place as the queen of romantic comedies in the early Noughties, with Maid In Manhattan and The Wedding Planner, and she describes Marry Me as a “homecoming” to the genre (her second of the year – Shotgun Wedding lands this summer).

As a movie-goer, she says, she loves them: “When Harry Met Sally or Prelude To A Kiss… the Meg Ryan era and Julia Roberts, all of those movies are what I grew up on.” The ‘hopeless romantic’ character is probably what film-goers associate with Lopez the most. She recalls a scene where Wilson’s character asks Kat, “Don’t you want to give up on the whole love thing?” Lopez, who has been engaged five times and married three, resonates with her character’s philosophy on the matter. “I understand that, like no, if there’s a one in a billion chance, no matter what the numbers are, that’s worth it. There were a lot of moments where I was able to bring a truth to the character in an emotional sense that was really authentic and real,” she says.

Naturally, music is a huge part of the film; Lopez recorded the soundtrack alongside filming and Maluma, 28, features on it too. Although he admits being “a bit nervous” about his first film, he says Lopez gave him a pep talk. “When I was there with Jennifer she was like, ‘Yo, we’re gonna do this, you’re gonna kill it.”

Wilson was not brought on to the movie for his musical talents though. “I’m not on the soundtrack for this movie,” he says, dryly. “I did actually have a song on Starsky & Hutch (2004, with Ben Stiller) and I remember that was a real challenge for the producer. He said that I broke three auto tune machines.”

Marry Me (12A) is out in cinemas now.