Ah, yes, because nothing says love quite like monetization.
On Tuesday, Variety’s Stephen Rodrick published a profile on Jennifer Lopez that covers the “Let’s Get Loud” singer’s latest project — a three-part multimedia bonanza that includes an album, a musical film and a documentary, all of which Lopez self-financed for $20 million. The theme of the three-part project is “Lopez’s life as a serial romantic,” according to Rodrick, and will heavily focus on her husband, Ben Affleck.
Rodrick got to view a few scenes from the documentary, titled, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” which is the name Affleck gave to a series of private love letters he wrote to Lopez. According to Rodrick, there is one scene in the doc in which Lopez invites a bunch of musicians to her home to help her write her new album (which is part of the three-part project) called, “This Is Me … Now,” a sequel to her 2002 album, “This Is Me … Then.”
In order to help inspire her fellow musicians, Rodrick writes that Lopez shared all of Affleck’s love letters with them — and Affleck catches her in the act.
“In the documentary, Affleck comes into the room and seems taken aback when he sees his letters being bandied about,” Rodrick writes. “He says to the camera, ‘I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told. If you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.’”
When this particular part of Rodrick’s profile made its way onto X, formerly Twitter, many users found it pretty off-putting.
What makes this move even more baffling is that Affleck has stated in the past that part of the reason why he and Lopez broke off their 2004 engagement was partially due to their lack of privacy.
“I would say [media attention] was about 50 percent [of what destroyed our relationship],” the “Air” star told Howard Stern in 2021, via Bazaar. “The idea that people hate you and they hate you together and that being together is poison and ugly and toxic and the thing none of us want to be part of … And, ‘Who the fuck would want to have them to dinner?’ And, ‘What the fuck are they doing together?’”
Rodrick also notes elsewhere in the Variety profile that Affleck implies in the documentary that he’s not all that thrilled about his wife making their private life public, but is “grudgingly” supporting her.
Rodrick writes:
“In the documentary, Affleck says, ‘Things that are private I always felt are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private.’ He then delivers an understatement: ‘So this was something of an adjustment for me.’”