Jennifer Lopez is no stranger to taking career risks.
The This Is Me…Now star revealed as much during a conversation with Nikki Glaser for Interview Magazine in which she claimed her team strongly advised her against becoming a judge on American Idol, which she starred on from 2011 to 2016.
According to Lopez, American Idol was “looked down upon” at the time.
“All of my advisers were like, ‘Don’t do this, you’re going to be reduced to just a reality star,'” she said. They reportedly warned her, “Nobody will ever hire you for a movie ever again.”
Lopez explained that she strongly disagreed and felt like she had “something to contribute.”
“I love music and I love mentoring people, and I wanted to share the things that I knew about the business,” she said. “So it became more about, ‘What do I think I can do with this?’ When I’m choosing things, even if they seem like not the best idea to everybody else, if I feel it in my gut that it’s the right thing to do, nobody can talk me out of it.”
Lopez starred on the show alongside Randy Jackson and Steven Tyler, and later, Harry Connick Jr. and Keith Urban.
Lopez said she was also warned against doing her residency in Las Vegas. “They were like, ‘That’s where entertainers go to die.’ And I was like no. And it launched me into a whole new part of my life,” she said.
“I’ll do things that could be risky because I believe that they’re going to turn out OK. I’d done all these big movies and made these albums and now they’re asking me to do reality TV,” she added.
Lopez explained that American Idol provided her a way back into the limelight after taking some time away to focus on her family, as her career slowed down after giving birth to twins in 2008. But her music and acting career took off again during her time on American Idol with roles in The Boy Next Door, Home, and Ice Age: Continental Drift, as well as several musical collabs.
Her stint on the Fox music competition was also followed by the short-lived NBC crime drama Shades of Blue and her award-nominated role in Hustlers.
Now, Lopez’s film career has entered a new era. She is currently set to adapt Emily Henry‘s bestselling novel Happy Place for a television series at Netflix. She is also set to star opposite Bret Goldstein in a new Netflix romcom, which is being described as an “office romance.”