Jennifer Lopez has a golden nugget of truth to share with an entertainment business forever focused on the new young thing: getting older is sexy, too. Maybe even, sexier.
“As you get older and you have more experience, you become a richer human being and you have more to offer,” Lopez, 54, told Elle magazine. “The idea of, ‘There’s nothing really valuable about watching a woman over 30’ is so ridiculous, it’s the opposite of right. It just makes me laugh.”
In fact, Lopez said, “People have realized that women just get sexier as they get older. They get more learned and more rich with character. All of that is very beautiful and attractive, and not just physically, but on the inside, the beauty that you gain as you get older, the wisdom you gain.”
Lopez is gearing up to release her long-awaited ninth studio album, This Is Me… Now (Feb. 16), her first full-length release in nearly a decade and a companion album of sorts to 2022’s This Is Me… Then. The multi-hyphenate star executive produced the collection with Rogét Chayed, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman and HitBoy and she’ll pair it with the Dave Meyers-directed This Is Me… Now: The Film, which will air on Prime Video in more than 240 countries.
It’s a full-court press of projects from the star, who told the magazine that she sees herself working as long as she wants to, regardless of age. “I don’t know what that age is. It might be 70, it might be 80, it might be 90, I don’t know,” she said. l”But I know that it’s there for me if I want it and I want to create it. That has always been the mindset that I’ve had: to never let anybody put me in a box because of where I was born, where I’m from, what age I am, anything like that. Those boundaries don’t exist for me.”
Lopez — whose Nuyorican Productions shingle has been behind films such as Hustlers and The Mother — also explained why it’s important for her to make projects for and about women. “You want to make great movies, at the end of the day. You want to make great television. And that should hit everybody. But at the same time, telling stories from a woman’s point of view does draw more of a [female] audience, or they relate to it more, or they get more fanatical about it and obsessed with it because they can feel that it’s not from the male gaze,” she said.
“With all the great women producers, directors, and actors who are taking more control of their careers and creating their own material, we’re in a very exciting time for women in Hollywood,” she added. “We’re not just on the corners of life or on the outside of the stories. We are the stories.”
For that reason, Lopez said that one of the key lessons she’s learned over the years is that women have to take ownership and can’t wait around for other people to hand them roles, while acknowledging that taking charge is crucial to getting things done. “A lot of actresses right now, they produce their own movies and develop their own material, and I think that’s key as well,” she said.
