For her role in the upcoming musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jennifer Lopez had to wear a 50-pound gold dress, which she called “so heavy” and a “nightmare.”
Lopez has called her role in the film—out October 10—the “role that I was born to play.”

Of Oscar buzz already circulating, Lopez said that “It’s great to be in the conversation” but added that she “realized that I don’t need it in the way that maybe I thought when I was younger.”
Jennifer Lopez has called her upcoming role in the film Kiss of the Spider Woman the “role that I was born to play”—but that doesn’t mean it didn’t involve a bit of a “nightmare,” in her words.
Speaking on CBS Sunday Morning on September 28, the entertainer called wearing a 50-pound gold dress for her role in the musical “so heavy,” adding that “When they would lift me up and I would try to move my leg and do the attitude—it was a nightmare.”

“The way the dress moved and the lines of the dress…it was perfect,” Lopez said. “We’d see it on the monitor and I was like, ‘I didn’t even realize the costume would be that good.’”

Speaking about her collaboration with costume designer Colleen Atwood, Lopez added, “I’m very into fashion. I always have been. I’m very into clothes and how my characters are going to look, and when she [Atwood] was so specific about it, it put me right into an idea right away, instead of me trying to craft it, find it. It was like, ‘This is what this is going to be,’ and I go, ‘Oh, okay. I know who I am in that moment.’”

Lopez is an actress, a singer, a dancer, an entrepreneur—and she opened up about her difficulties over the years being taken seriously: “People, when they see you first as one thing, it’s hard for them to see you as something else,” she said. “You just have to show them. You can’t let that discourage you.”

“I’ve always felt a bit of the underdog,” she continued. “Definitely misunderstood. But it comes with the territory of being in the public eye. People are not gonna really know who you are, your heart. And then they see it and go, ‘Oh, that’s who she is,’ then they hear something and they go, ‘Oh, no, that’s not who she is.’ And they get confused. I get it. I understand. But I stay steady. And that’s the most important thing, I think. I don’t change. I grow, but I don’t change.”

Ahead of the movie’s premiere on October 10, Lopez is generating Oscar buzz for her role of “silver screen diva” Aurora, otherwise known as Ingrid Luna. Kiss of the Spider Woman is Lopez’s first movie musical; she called it the role she’s “been waiting for my whole life.” Of awards season speculation, Lopez said “It’s great to be in the conversation.”

“Like, you’re doing work that people recognize, and that they love,” she added. “That’s enough.”

Of whether she puts that pressure on herself to win big awards, she responded, “I don’t, I don’t—I learned my lesson last time,” likely referring to 2019’s Hustlers, where her role earned her Oscar buzz as well as a Golden Globe nomination.