Jennifer Lopez Thought She Broke Her Co-Star’s Nose in ‘Hustlers’
Jennifer Lopez got a bit too into character while working with her co-star Constance Wu in Hustlers. So much so that Lopez worried she might’ve given Wu a deep injury.
How Jennifer Lopez made Constance Wu bleed
Lopez took Wu under her wing both in front of the camera and behind the scenes in Hustlers. In the film, Lopez played a veteran stripper guiding Wu’s character through their shady industry. Upon meeting her co-star, the American Idol host wasted no time making Wu feel at home.
“The minute I saw Constance, I put my arms out and took her under my wing and put her in my coat like, ‘I got you,’” Lopez said according to Refinery 29. “I said, ‘I’m going to take care of you and I’m going to show you the ropes.'”
Hustlers filmmaker Lorene Scafaria reaffirmed that they developed a “big sister/little sister” relationship immediately. Which mirrored the friendship the two actors shared in the 2019 feature.
“Now we have this relationship where it’s exactly that — we love each other and we take care of each other,” Lopez said.
Although they worked well together, mistakes still happened while they were filming.
“ I knew she was a gangster when we were doing this scene,” Lopez said to Access Hollywood (via Ace Showbiz). “There’s a scene where I tell her to hang up the phone, and she won’t hang up the phone.”
The moment led to a sequence where Lopez accidentally punched Wu in the face.
“In the first take, I say to her, ‘We’re going to fight it out.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. You’re good.’ I was like, ‘Are you sure? OK’ I did it, and I was like, ‘Pow!’ And she started fighting more than me even. Then the phone smacks her in the nose and cuts her nose open,” she said.
The take might’ve been a testament to Wu’s toughness, but it left Lopez in a brief panic.
“I was so nervous, I was like, I broke her nose,” she remembered.
Constance Wu once addressed rumors that she demanded top billing over Jennifer Lopez in ‘Hustlers’
Wu confided that she couldn’t have had a better time working alongside Lopez. She spoke highly of Lopez’s behavior on set, which was a far cry away from the diva she was once rumored to be.
“Me and Jen,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “I mean, it was the most peaceful set I’ve ever been on. Jen is such a big star that it was amazing to see what a down-to-earth kind of person she was. She’s really cool.”
But for some time, Wu was also accused of being a diva as well. There were rumors that Wu demanded top billing over Lopez in Hustlers. But Wu denied that this was her idea.
“I wasn’t demanding anything,” she clarified. “The reason that happened was because people on the team were calling journalists because they were not putting me in [their stories about the film]. It wasn’t anything I asked them to do.”
Wu felt the gossip was a part of a larger problem in the media, which she believed often liked to pit women against each other.
“People stereotyping us separates us, and when we are not unified it helps the patriarchy stay in power, right? If you’re at a board meeting and there’s only one seat for a woman and all the other seats are for men, it’s not about being a woman – if you think there’s only one seat, it’s going to be competitive. If it’s a board meeting of all women and there’s only one seat for a man, the men will start becoming competitive. It’s about the scarcity, not gender,” she said.
“That was what was really special about Hustlers. Nobody was fighting about the one seat at the table. It was our table. The men in the movie barely have names,” she added.
