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In a joint interview, the pair talk to Harper’s Bazaar about how the film came to be—and why being a JLo stan worked in Goldstein’s favor
, she’s a lower status. She’s a working girl, aspiring to something. She’s pushed aside by the world, and she’s trying her best,” Goldstein, who co-wrote the film with his partner Joe Kelly, tellswhile seated next to Lopez, who is wearing a white floral lace bustier with a black skirt.
“We wanted to make a love letter to workaholics and also a more grown-up, adult film. It was looking at and going, ‘Well, what if she’s the CEO now? What if she’s made it?
She has a lot of power, and she is also proud of her work. She loves what she’s done and what she’s built. ’” It all began back in 2022, when Goldstein and Kelly found themselves discussing their mutual love for old-school rom-coms likeduring a three-hour train ride from Manchester to London.
By the time they arrived at their destination, they had mapped out the entire story for a new take on the genre, with Lopez as theirchoice to play the protagonist. As longtime connoisseurs of her filmography, Goldstein and Kelly were eager to see her embody a different kind of romantic lead.
Although she claims she rarely receives scripts written specifically for her, Lopez was flattered to learn that the actor behind’s gruff footballer Roy Kent had penned a starring vehicle for her. Having now made nearly a dozen rom-coms, Lopez’s litmus test for them is quite simple.
“At the end of the day, you want to look at the script and go, ‘This is really romantic. The story works. It’s a new kind of take,’” she explains. She understood the ways in which Goldstein and Kelly had modernized the classic tropes of the genre, including its “more adult-type jokes,” mostly to do with sex.
“It’s very much Brett’s brand of writing—it’s these hard jokes where people are cursing, but also it has a very wholesome quality to it. I love that mix. I was very excited to do it. ” Most notably, Lopez says she identified with the divide between Jackie’s private and public selves.
“I think Jackie’s very misunderstood in this , and I understood being misunderstood,” Lopez reveals, as one of the most famous entertainers in the world. When Daniel first arrives at Jackie’s airline, the workers warn him about her prickly demeanor, but once they meet, he is quickly able to see through the seemingly impenetrable façade that she puts up at work.
“Daniel says, ‘Wait a minute, all these people are afraid of you and think you’re mean and think you’re a person that you’re not. Why don’t you let them see you? ’ And she’s like, ‘I just like my safe little bubble. I don’t have to kind of defend myself in that way.
’ I understand that ,” Lopez continues.
“I really felt like maybe he saw me in real life and put that in the character. I don’t know if that’s true, but I felt that way. ” Even in conversation with a journalist, the two share a playful banter that translates so effortlessly to the big screen.
“I think it’s a natural thing when you meet someone, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, I have a natural chemistry with them,’ or you’re attracted immediately,” Lopez says. Goldstein, who jokes that Lopez is “such a good actor” that “she could have chemistry with a paper bag,” happily concurs: “I felt like it was there the first Zoom we had , and we didn’t have to do any work.
”zeroes-in on a more grown-up take on falling in love is the fact that Jackie and Daniel respect each other professionally, and that respect factors into their attraction to each other.
“They see a kindred spirit, in that they’re both two people who love their work,” Goldstein says of Daniel and Jackie, who fall for each other after he represents her in a deposition involving an annoying litigant. “It’s a of, ‘Oh, you take this seriously. You care about the work, and you do a good job. That means something to you.
We have the same thing in common. ’” Goldstein is personally familiar with that idea of work-life balance, as a self-described workaholic.
“On the one hand I always say, ‘Well, I’m very lucky I get to do whatever I want to do, but other people would probably accuse me of avoiding any emotional life, because I’m always working,” he adds. “I think that’s true of both of these characters—they love their work, they’re very proud of it, but it also means that they don’t have to be vulnerable.
” Switching the gendered power dynamics of the typical rom-com is another way Goldstein and Kelly looked to update the story to modern times.
“What I love about it is the fact that she’s a woman and the CEO is not a big deal,” Lopez says, noting the dearth of mainstream representation of Latinas in positions of power. “It’s very like, ‘I’m the boss here, so let’s just do this. ’ Nobody’s questioning it, and nobody’s making a big deal about it. She’s the one who built this company with her dad, and it doesn’t lend to the comedy.
What lends to the comedy is the fact that they have to hide this relationship, and it doesn’t matter if she’s the boss or he’s the boss. I love when gender or race goes away, and it’s just people . To me, that’s important in films, and I think this does that very well.
”In a brilliant bit of casting, Edward James Olmos—who famously played patriarch Abraham Quintanilla in 1997’s, which launched Lopez to stardom—steps into the role of Jackie’s domineering father, Captain Jack Cruz. According to Lopez and Goldstein, there was never anyone else in the running for the part.
“It was just like, ‘Eddie should play my dad! ’,” she recalls, revealing that one of the few notes she gave Goldstein and Kelly upon first reading the script was to flesh out Jackie and Jack’s relationship.
“We’re lucky that he did it—we have two great scenes with him that are really pivotal scenes. ”, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary next March.
“Somebody just asked me randomly, ‘If you could relive one moment in your career, what would it be? ’ All these moments flash through my head, but the one I’d want to relive is probably filmingbecause I really understood the impact of it,” Lopez says, pointing out the historical significance of being the first Latina actress to earn $1 million for a movie role.
“I understood how important was to the community and the gravity of taking on that role. ” But beyond that, the film was also a personal inspiration for the multi-hyphenate star, whose global success has long mirrored the very cross-cultural stardom that Quintanilla-Perez was poised to achieve before her tragic death at age 23.
“The truth is will always be a big part. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have taken the impetus to even get into the music business,” Lopez continues.
“I always wanted to sing and dance because I started as a dancer, but it wasn’t until I did that movie and I was on a stadium stage filming that opening scene that I was like, ‘Oh, I should be doing this. This is what I want to do'. ”, Lopez and Goldstein have already been dreaming up their next collaboration.
Lopez says she wouldn’t hesitate to step onto the sets of, but he has aspirations of forging a creative partnership with Lopez in the same vein as Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore.
“He has to get to writing in between all the other things he’s writing,” Lopez laughs. Goldstein is more than up for the challenge.
“I would like us to do 10 films together before we die,” he says. In recent years, despite the enduring appeal of rom-coms, Hollywood studios have seemingly shifted away from investing in the genre. While Lopez is unsure if modern audiences have become harder to surprise or simply too cynical, she notes that the advent of big-budget television in the 2010s made shock value “kind of in vogue for the moment. ” “Honestly, I think things go in cycles.
I think people’s sensibility went someplace else for a little while, but never going to stop loving a great rom-com—no generation—because at the base of romantic comedies is all of life,” Lopez says.
“Life is funny, and everybody’s searching for someone. Those two things will always be true. So if you can really put those things together in an interesting way... we know how we want the romantic comedy to end, but the journey along that can remind us and give us hope that we can find it too. I think that’s the thing about romantic comedies that will never go out of style. ”
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