Though J.Lo’s musical film is packed with starry moments, there’s an equally long list of those who were in consideration.
The list of names considered for Jennifer Lopez’s star-studded Zodiac Council in This Is Me…Now is more impressive than any music festival lineup.
Though the feature film is bursting with starry cameos, including appearances from Jane Fonda, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Post Malone, Kim Petras, Keke Palmer, Jenifer Lewis, and more, it was almost even more extra.
In The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a behind-the-scenes documentary streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, we get an inside look at Lopez’s process making This Is Me…Now — and the bounty of buzzy names she considered for her musical project.
The doc reveals that those who were asked and declined or were unavailable include Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Lizzo, Jason Momoa, Jennifer Coolidge, and Snoop Dogg. Additionally, Vanessa Hudgens was pitched to play one of the friends to Lopez’s dramatized protagonist but ultimately was not cast, and Khloe Kardashian was also supposed to cameo.
But Lopez tells EW that there are no “stars who got away,” and that she’s thrilled with the final result. “They were giving me a list of all these amazing people, and I was like, ‘Yes, I like all of those people, but that’s not what I want,'” she says. “My first people were Jenifer Lewis and Jane Fonda, and they were like, ‘Wait, we don’t get it. This is like music. This is young.'” And I was like, ‘No. This is a council of people who I want to be very diverse. I want all different kinds of people.”
“These are people with all different personality traits from all different walks of life,” Lopez continues. “But they all have something that affected me in some way — their philosophy on life, on love, on the universe, on music. That was the list that I made.”
Lopez urges viewers to watch closely and note that she’s not disappointed when she’s told certain individuals aren’t available. “The casting director and the other producers came in and they were like, ‘How about this person? This person’s not available.’ And they started saying all these people. If you see me sitting there, that’s not what I want. What I want is people who represent a certain thing, who could understand what I’m trying to do here. And that’s what it took, because they needed to trust me, and at the end of the day,” she says, laughing, “I think it was a big leap of faith for some of them.”
