Jennifer Lopez reflects on how her ‘world exploded’ in the past year

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — Jennifer Lopez is getting real about her life.

In a conversation with comedian Nikki Glaser for Interview magazine, Lopez talked about the past year of her life, which included the cancellation of her planned concert tour and the end of her marriage to Ben Affleck.

Glaser and Lopez began their chat discussing Lopez playing Judy Robles in the film “Unstoppable.” Robles is the mother of athlete Anthony Robles, who was born with one leg and went on to become an accomplished wrestler.

Glaser tied Lopez’s preparation for the role into the star’s “struggle with low self-esteem.”

“My whole life has been proving my enoughness,” Lopez said. “Dealing with feeling like you’re enough, from when you’re very young, is something that you don’t figure out for a long time, because you’re not looking at yourself like that. Something is driving you and your decisions and you don’t know why.”

Lopez said some of that motivation stemmed from childhood feelings of “being ignored, being a middle child, having a very outgoing mom and a dad who worked all day and worked all night and feeling like you weren’t important, like you weren’t a priority.”

“That embeds in you, and I think your parents are doing the best they can. Even now being a parent, I have much more empathy for what they’ve been through,” she said. “I love my parents, but I do see the effect of who they were and how they were raised, on me. You don’t even really know until those things start manifesting in your actual adult relationships.”

The conversation then turned to her past few months, which have not been the easiest for Lopez.

Working on the movie as well as her “This Is Me…Now” album, short film and accompanying documentary had Lopez feeling like “…whoa, I got here.”

“I’m good,” she said. “I did all the work and look at where I am, and then it was like my whole f**king world exploded.”

Her highly publicized relationship with Affleck, which involved them reuniting decades after their first engagement ended, got even more attention in August, when Lopez filed for divorce.

She is now looking ahead, not behind, it seems.

“Now I’m excited, when you say you’re just going to be on your own,” Lopez said. “Yes, I’m not looking for anybody, because everything that I’ve done over the past 25, 30 years, being in these different challenging situations, what can I f**kng do when it’s just me flying on my own.”

“What if I’m just free?” she added.

“Unstoppable” is scheduled for limited release in theaters in December.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.