Marry Me is your Pre-Valentine cinematic eye & ear-candy

Jennifer Lopez reminisces on what it’s like before and after living a dream

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Date Night clip / JLo’s casting Kat in Marry Me

Two total and completely opposite strangers agree to marry and get to know each other in Marry Me, starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. But as forces conspire to separate them, the universal question arises: Can two people from such different worlds bridge the gulf between them and build a place where they both belong? 

When we meet global superstar Kat Valdez, played by Jennifer Lopez, she’s about to be married to her fiancé, Bastian (Maluma). Together, they’ve become the hottest celebrity couple on the planet and are about to be wed publicly, live, in front of the whole world. Their smash duet single, “Marry Me” has become the biggest song of the year. Everything in her life seems, on the surface, to be perfection. But the reality of her life is far more complex. “Kat’s a global superstar who is also a strong, confidant businesswoman,” Jennifer Lopez says. “She’s a boss but also a regular person who gets lonely and needs love. She wants to feel like she has a home and isn’t a gypsy traveling the world.” 

When Kat discovers, seconds before her wedding, that Bastian has been unfaithful to her, the façade and the fantasy of what her life can be disintegrates around her. “In one second, everything changes, and it all falls apart,” Lopez says. “Kat blames herself for not seeing the truth, but also makes a spontaneous choice to marry somebody else in the audience. That’s how she meets Charlie. With that, her life completely changes, as it does when you meet someone who sees you for who you are.”

Lopez, of course, knows what it is like to navigate a romantic relationship in the glare of the public eye. “Living a life in the spotlight has its challenges,” Lopez says. “The truth is that nobody wants to hear the ‘woe is me…’ part of that, but it has a scrutiny and a judgment to it that most people don’t ever have to deal with. That can be very lonely.” What the public often forgets, for both Lopez and Kat, is that there’s a real person dealing with real pain and loss behind the clickbait headlines. 

The key to surviving it, Lopez says, is to stay focused on who you really are rather than on how the public views you. “Kat never forgets that she was a little girl growing up with a dream,” Lopez says. “It’s the same for me. Remembering where I came from has always kept me grounded. I don’t feel any different, and I think that’s what people forget. That’s why I’ve made songs over the years like ‘Jenny from the Block’ and ‘I’m Real.’ I’m still the same person, but I’m just doing these things with my life and it has expanded and grown. Still, there’s a human being there.”   

Playing Kat, Lopez says, allowed her to explore and expose these ideas, both on the screen and within herself. “It was about baring my soul in every moment,” Lopez says. “It was more uncomfortable than playing a character that is nothing like you, because I brought experience into a world in a way that I’ve never had to before. This is also the first time that I’ve been able to make an album with a movie, which has been a dream of mine. It’s the first time I’ve done a movie with music since Selena, and in that film, they used Selena’s voice, so I never got to sing myself.”

From Universal Pictures International, say yes when Marry Me opens in local cinemas on February 9.