Spoilers below.
Ben Affleck’s impact is all over Jennifer Lopez’s new film, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story, but does the actor have his own role in the project? Those who might’ve just watched the new release on Prime Video are probably wondering where he is. Affleck actually has two roles—but only one where his face is shown.
Affleck of course plays “the Biker,” the great love Lopez begins the film with. That character appears again at the end as Lopez’s final love interest, echoing his and Lopez’s real love story. But he has no dialogue nor is he fully visible.
Affleck’s bigger role is much more surprising…and somewhat hidden.
He makes blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances between scenes as news anchor/talk show host Rex Stone. You might him flashing across the screen in news segments, on his program, called The Truth Report, or playing on a TV in the background of a room. That said, you might not recognize him with his Southern accent, prosthetic nose, and blond wig. (The costume is eerily Trump-like.)
Affleck, who’s also an Oscar-winning director and producer, was involved behind the scenes, too. He also offered his wife some movie-making wisdom, which she took to heart since she funded the $20 million project herself.
“Ben told me, ‘You’re gonna write it, and then you’re going to film it,’” Lopez told Variety. “When you’re done, you’re going to do a rough cut, and you’re gonna see what it needs, and you’re gonna do three days of reshoots.’ That’s when I said, ‘I can’t do that—I don’t have any more money!’ But he was like, ‘You’re going to do a few days of reshoots, and then you’re going to go back in and edit it. And you’re going to tell your story.’”
After she showed him the final cut last year, Lopez recalled, “He said, ‘You made a movie. For you. You made a great movie. You did it.’” She added, “Honestly, I don’t care what happens now. That is the biggest kind of compliment that I could get.”
We’ll likely see more of Affleck in J.Lo’s upcoming documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which promises to show a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the album and film. The title itself takes its name after a series of love letters Affleck had written to Lopez, which she had kept private but showed them to her collaborators, and on tape for the documentary, for inspiration.
“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,” he says on camera, according to Variety.
He’s set to appear in more interviews and insider footage on the doc, too. In the meantime, you can catch his influence in This Is Me…Now, both the film and the new album, both out today.
Watch This Is Me…Now: A Love Story on Prime Video