Jennifer Lopez is enjoying a major career high after the success of her movie Hustlers and her upcoming Super Bowl halftime performance with Shaklra. But not that long ago, she was a young actor figuring out the entertainment industry, and that included navigating some uncomfortable moments. This week, she opened up about one specific incident in which she says a director asked her to take her top off during a costume fitting.
“He wanted to see my boobs and I was like, ‘We’re not on set,’” Lopez said during the Hollywood Reporter‘s Drama Actress Roundtable,, which also included Scarlett Johansson, Lupita Nyong’o, Awkwafina, Laura Dern, and Renée Zellweger.
“And I said no; I stood up for myself,” she continued. “But it was so funny because I remember being so panicked in the moment. And by the way, there was a costume designer in the room with me. So there was another woman in the room, and he says this and I said no. Luckily a little bit of the Bronx came out, and I was like, ‘I don’t have to show you my—No. On the set, you see them.’”
Lopez added, “If you give in, in that moment, all of a sudden that person is off and running, thinking they can do whatever they want. And because I put up a little boundary right there and said no, he laid off and then later on apologized. But the minute he walked out of the room, the costume designer was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that just happened.’”
Now Lopez says she’s made a concerted effort to make the sets she’s a part of as comfortable as possible for women. She shared that for Hustlers, there were comfort coaches around to make sure everyone felt at ease, particularly since the movie involved nudity.
“It was basically somebody who understood that world and said, ‘These things are okay,’ and, ‘These things are not okay’…and made everybody on the set comfortable with what they were doing, because we had a lot of women who were half-dressed or naked, topless,” she said.