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Although Ben Affleck’s movie Jersey Girl wasn’t too well-received when it debuted, Affleck himself once asserted he was fond of the project. But he admitted there was one scene in Jersey Girl that he felt a bit embarrassed by.
Ben Affleck felt that his relationship with Jennifer Lopez overshadowed ‘Jersey Girl’
The first time Affleck found himself dating Jennifer Lopez was met with a lot of chaos and scandals. It didn’t help that Affleck and Lopez became a couple at the beginning of the tabloid era, which they became the center of.
Affleck believed that the popularity and attention of their relationship became a detriment to their own projects. Jersey Girl, for instance, might have been overshadowed thanks to Affleck’s relationship with Lopez.
“It’s a strange thing, and it really is a shame in some ways that my relationship with Jennifer really overshadowed a movie that I’m really proud of,” Affleck once said in an interview with Phase 9. “There’s a prurient interest that undermines your telling [of] a story because that depends on asking an audience to suspend their disbelief. That’s made harder if you’re bombarded with images of people in the movie as other people than who you’re trying to convince them you are.”
Ben Affleck joked he was humiliated acting alongside his 8-year-old co-star
In the Kevin Smith-directed feature, Affleck and Lopez are the parents of an eight-year-old girl played by Raquel Castro. Then a new actor at the time, Affleck confided that he was impressed by the level of talent Castro already possessed.
“I’ve worked with quite a few actresses, and she ranks right up there with ones I’ve been intimidated by! It was kind of scary,” he said.
The film included a musical number that Affleck and Castro both participated in despite Affleck’s feelings towards the scene.
“That was what she was looking forward to the whole time whereas it was the one thing I was dreading,” Affleck revealed. “I’m a musical disaster, I’m tone deaf, so it was excruciating for me to try to sing. And then to be up there singing and dancing – I think Kevin wrote it in specifically to humiliate me.”
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Meanwhile, Castro easily outperformed Affleck in the scene, adding to his embarrassment.
“We had to take these little music rehearsals and I was miserably floundering around while she was chirping along hitting all the right notes at the right tempo. So I was there being upstaged and humiliated by an 8-year-old girl,” he said.
Ben Affleck felt bad about ‘Jersey Girl’ and Jennifer Lopez’s involvement in it
Affleck felt a certain level of responsibility for the film’s controversy due to his relationship with Lopez. Especially since he originally brought Lopez on board the film in the first place. A decision that would later pose a threat to the film’s performance.
“I feel bad, and I feel so much a part of it. Here I was, and I asked Jen to do this small part as a favor to me. And I said, ‘Hey Kevin, what if Jennifer does it?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, great.’ And then now it turns out that it’s… that that element of the story threatens to subsume the rest of the movie,” he once said in an IGN interview.
This was particularly disappointing for Affleck, who felt they had a good movie on their hands with Jersey Girl.
“Yeah, it’s a shame. It’s too bad. It is. And I hope that ultimately what happens is that people are able to sort of look at the story and see that actually this movie is good. You know what I mean? Because I think it deserves that,” Affleck said.
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