Jennifer Lopez’s Acting Style Clashed With Marc Anthony’s in ‘El Cantente’
Jennifer Lopez worked with her ex-husband, Marc Anthony, for the first time in the biographical drama El Cantente. But she quickly discovered that their acting styles weren’t exactly compatible.
Jennifer Lopez explained what it was like working with Marc Anthony on ‘El Cantante’
Lopez acted alongside her former husband for the first time in the 2006 biopic El Cantante. The feature focused on the life of salsa singer Hector Lavoe, told from the perspective of his wife Pucci. Being the producer of the film, Lopez cast Anthony as Hector before she ended up casting herself as his wife.
“I knew that he was the guy to play the role, so I called him a month later, and I asked him if he wanted to attach himself to this,” Lopez once told Ok! “At that time, I didn’t even know I was going to play Pucci, to tell you the truth. But I did know that I wanted it to be the first thing I produced. So I called him as the producer of the film and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and he said, ‘Yes, of course. This guy’s my idol.’ I’m like, ‘OK,'” she remembered.
She and Anthony had a lot of chemistry together on screen, perhaps a byproduct of their innate synergy.
“We met working. That’s what everybody forgets. The first time we met we were doing a song together, and it worked. It was on my first album. We have chemistry naturally, luckily. We always planned to do this film together, even when we weren’t together,” she added.
Their different acting styles did present a challenge, however. Lopez was the far more experienced actor of the two. Over the years, she developed certain conditions for acting that clashed with Anthony’s way of performing.
“We have different acting styles. He’s kind of a method actor; he likes to improvise. He says, ‘Don’t worry, just go with it.’ I’m very disciplined. I know all my lines; I know all his lines,” Lopez once told Irish Examiner.
Jennifer Lopez lost control of herself during her onscreen fight with Marc Anthony
The Wedding Planner star confided that she and Anthony became a little too immersed in their fight scenes while filming. The pair had their share of arguments in real life, as do most couples. Still, their fights were nothing like the wars their onscreen couples had. Lopez admitted she was the one at fault for ramping up the tension between herself and Anthony.
“While we were shooting one of the scenes actually when she comes home and she sees that he’s been getting high in the house and the son is there, we were shooting that scene, and she starts arguing,” Lopez recalled. “I start going after him. Now, obviously, a lot of stuff we did was improvised. They were like, ‘You two, go at it.’ I decided that I was going to literally go after Marc in one scene. I did it the first take, and I didn’t really go after him. And then, in the second take, I decided I was just going to push him, and I wanted to get him out of the house. Just get out! Because he wanted to leave. I pushed him. He’s not expecting it or anything, and he starts struggling.”
When Anthony reacted, the set’s crew had to separate the two and snap the couple back into reality.
“He grabs my arm, and I’m like, ‘Let go! Let go of my arm right now,” Lopez said. “And we start getting into it. All of a sudden, he’s like, ‘Jennifer!’ I’m calling him Hector; he’s calling me Jennifer, and suddenly, the whole set just breaks up because it was so tense. They were like, ‘Do you guys get into fights like this at home?’ No, not like this.”
