Turns out, Jennifer Lopez is the original “I don’t know her.”
While Mariah Carey’s legendary shade of J.Lo in 2016 spawned countless memes online, a newly resurfaced interview with then-rising-star Lopez from over two decades ago is full of shade-throwing — particularly about fellow actress and wellness doyenne Gwyneth Paltrow.
“Tell me what she’s been in? I swear to God, I don’t remember anything she was in,” Lopez searingly said of Paltrow in the 1998 Movieline interview, in which she also dragged most of her female peers. “Some people get hot by association. I heard more about her and Brad Pitt than I ever heard about her work.”
The extensive interview with Movieline was conducted when Lopez, then 27 and still married to her first husband Ojani Noa, was full of what she called “stardom glow” after the success of “Selena” and landing parts in “Out of Sight” and “Thieves.”
The article is going viral on Twitter and being shared by industry insiders amid the Oscars buzz the 50-year-old is getting for her role as a stripper in “Hustlers.” In the interview, which eventually turns into a straight-up roast of Hollywood women, J.Lo shows that she’s always had the nerve required to nail that kind of role.
“I’m the best,” Lopez said in the interview, which she gave while bikini-clad poolside after a massage, naturally. “If you have the goods, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If somebody doesn’t have the goods, they’re insecure. I don’t have that problem. I’m not the best actress that ever lived, but I know I’m pretty good.”
Referring to herself as rising from “the bottom of the A-list of actresses,” Lopez did not mince her words about other stars, though, referring to Cameron Diaz as a “lucky model” and saying she was “never a big fan of” Winona Ryder.
When asked about Diaz, Lopez referred to her as someone “who’s been given a lot of opportunities I just wish she would have done more with. She’s beautiful and has a great presence, though.”
The tea doesn’t stop spilling there, though.
As for Claire Danes, J.Lo called her a “good actress” but admitted she wasn’t impressed with the variety of her roles. “I feel like I see a lot of the same thing with every character she does,” she said.
Lopez also had some thoughts about lauded performers such as Ryder and Madonna, giving them both the big thumbs-down.
“In Hollywood she’s revered, she gets nominated for Oscars, but I’ve never heard anyone in the public or among my friends say, ‘Oh, I love her,'” she said of Ryder. Lopez continues to ever-so-subtly drag her with: “She’s cute and talented, though, and I’d like her just for looking like my older sister, Leslie.”
As for Madge, Lopez was critical of her acting chops, in no uncertain terms. “Do I think she’s a great performer? Yeah. Do I think she’s a great actress? No,” she said. “Acting is what I do, so I’m harder on people when they say, ‘Oh, I can do that — I can act.’ I’m like, ‘Hey, don’t spit on my craft.’ ”
Jenny from the Block was particularly biting about Salma Hayek, who reportedly said she was offered the lead role in 1997’s “Selena” over Lopez but turned it down.
“We’re in two different realms,” she said of Hayek. “She’s a sexy bombshell and those are the kinds of roles she does. I do all kinds of different things. It makes me laugh when she says she got offered ‘Selena,’ which was an outright lie. If that’s what she does to get herself publicity, then that’s her thing.”
However, three years later, Lopez revealed that she was “misquoted” in the interview and “cried for hours” after reading it.
“I was so misquoted and so taken out of context, and it’s a sore subject for me,” Lopez told Vanity Fair in 2001. “I don’t like to hurt anybody. I don’t like to hurt their feelings. I like to joke, so I do that sometimes. What they wrote in that article hurt people.”
Lopez talked about the infamous profile with NPR in 2018, saying she was regretful given she “was a nobody at that time.”
“It gave me a lot of notoriety in the moment, and then it made a lot of people in the industry really pissed off,” she said. “And so when I look back at it now, I go, ‘You know I never wanted to hurt anybody.’ I didn’t realize that my words could impact people that way.”