Jennifer Lopez remembers the magic of movie ‘Selena’ on 25th anniversary
Jennifer Lopez performs a medley at the iHeartRadio Music Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Tuesday. AP
Twenty-five years after “Selena” hit theatres on March 21, 1997, Jennifer Lopez fondly revisited her acclaimed performance as the late Tejano icon.
In honour of the biopic turning 25, Lopez posted a series of clips from the film as well as sound bites from interviews discussing her star-making turn as Selena Quintanilla, who was killed two years before the movie premiered. “What a very special day,” Lopez wrote on Monday on Instagram.
“Today we celebrate and honour Selena’s legacy and music. This movie means so much to me … Selena and her family mean so much to me, and I was so lucky to be chosen to play her. I’ll never forget this time in my life and it’s an honour as an artist to have been part of the magic that is this movie.”
Among the footage Lopez shared was a snippet of her 1997 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
The performer, who was 27 at the time, appeared on the hit daytime program alongside the Quintanilla family to talk about honoring the trailblazing entertainer on the big screen. Selena’s loved ones were on set “every day,” Lopez told Winfrey at the time.
“It was tough, but I knew I had a tough job ahead of me. From the second I got the role, it was nonstop. I was working on another movie at the time, and in my trailer, it was music all day, videos all day just to really absorb who she was.
“She was a very, very happy and alive person. I just absorbed as much as I could of her, tried to understand what made her tick, what made her happy, what made her sad — things that were important in her life ... Don’t get me wrong, it was nerve-wracking. But having them there and having them care about the project was a beautiful thing for me.”
In another, more recent interview, Lopez recalled a piece of advice she received from her onscreen father, Edward James Olmos — who portrayed Abraham Quintanilla — after tirelessly studying Selena’s every move out of fear of messing up. Before starring in “Selena,” Lopez had acted only in a handful of movies and still had yet to release her debut studio album. Olmos “came to me and said, ‘You know everything.
Just let it go. Don’t think — just let it go and be,’” Lopez remembered. “And we filmed that big scene in the Astrodome with the purple outfit, and it was magic. But you have to let go at some point. You have to let go of everything and just do your thing.”
The quarter-century milestone comes shortly after Abraham Quintanilla revealed that his family is collaborating with Warner Music on a new Selena album. The record will feature the voice of young Selena, digitally edited to sound “like she did right before she passed away” — a controversial approach that has sparked debate among the Tejano legend’s loyal fans.
Tribune News Service
