Marc Anthony Almost Quit His Only Film With Ex Jennifer Lopez Because of Their Abusive Scenes
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony once starred in a feature that Lopez felt was criminally overlooked by many in the film industry. But because of the movie’s extreme story, they were warned about doing a movie where they played a very violent couple.
‘El Cantante’ wasn’t the only time Jennifer Lopez worked with her ex-husband Marc Anthony
El Cantante was a bit of a passion project for Lopez. It was a biographical film starring her husband at the time Anthony as singer Hector Lavoe. Lopez ended up playing his onscreen wife in the film, marking the former couple’s onscreen debut. It may have been the first time they came together on the big screen, but it wasn’t their first collaboration.
Anthony and Lopez teamed up for the 1999 song “No Me Ames”, which became one of Lopez’s biggest hits. The team-up came to be thanks to her producer at the time Cory Rooney.
“Cory had just worked with Marc, and Marc and I had just met. Cory was like, ‘You and Marc should do a record together, let’s call him and see if he wants to do it.’ He came by the studio and we played him some of the stuff we were doing, he was like, ‘okay, okay,’ and I was such a huge fan of his music in Spanish, and I was like, ‘Maybe we should do something in Spanish, I just love your music,’” Lopez recalled in an interview with Billboard.
After thinking about it, Anthony agreed to work with Lopez on the record. Years later the two would cultivate a relationship and share two children together.
Marc Anthony almost quit ‘El Cantante’ because of abusive scenes with Jennifer Lopez
Their onscreen relationship in the film El Cantante was vastly different from their relationship in real life. Keeping true to the characters they were playing, the two depicted a violent and abusive marriage. Anthony and Lopez were told beforehand how problematic the more physical scenes could be for them.
“All my actor friends warned us, saying, ‘Those abusive husband-and wife scenes are going to be difficult. It almost scared me into quitting,” Anthony once told Latina (via Female First).
But Anthony asserted that the scenes put their own marriage in a more positive light at the time.
“With those scenes, we’d end up exhausted. But driving home, we’d just look at each other and say, ‘We are so normal,’” he recalled.
Jennifer Lopez started a physical fight with Marc Anthony for ‘El Cantante’
Lopez was determined to up the ante during her fight scenes with Anthony. During an intense and suspenseful scene with her husband, the multi-platinum artist thought it’d be best to improvise.
“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,” Lopez once said in an interview with Ok.
Anthony was completely caught off guard during the scene, which led to him breaking character. However, Lopez remained in character to heighten the tension between them.
“He grabs my arm, and I’m like let go! Let go of my arm right now!’ 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,” she remembered.
