Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez experienced a lot of vitriol and online hate the first time they came together. The star couple were even further criticized by some after doing Lopez’s music video for “Jenny from the Block”.
Ben Affleck regretted doing the music video ‘Jenny from the Block’
Affleck experienced a difficult period in Hollywood in the early 2000s. Particularly, his relationship with Jennifer Lopez was courting all kinds of negative press. Somewhere along the way Affleck gained a reputation that he was somehow encouraging the attention he was getting. A notion he found absurd.
“The most pernicious illusion, myth, was that this is something that this guy wants,” Affleck once said in an interview with GQ. “‘He’s wanting this much coverage.’ That’s the most unappealing thing that you can say about somebody.”
Starring in the Lopez music video “Jenny from the Block” didn’t help matters at the time. Affleck and Lopez received even more hate from detractors, so much so that the star didn’t look back on the video too fondly.
“If I have a big regret, it was doing the music video. But that happened years ago. I’ve moved on,” he once said according to Irish Examiner.
Ben Affleck once said Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Jenny from the Block’ music video was supposed to make people uncomfortable
Affleck was well aware of the over-exposure his relationship with Jennifer Lopez experienced the first time around. His appearance in Jenny from the Block only further convinced his critics, however, that the exposure was something he wanted.
But in a resurfaced interview with CBR, Affleck confided that the video intended to parody Affleck and Lopez’s real relationship. Both with themselves and the media.
“I thought to myself, here’s a really good example to hold up this particular pop-culture phenomena to the light and ask, ‘What is this thing that we kind of collectively engage in? This group voyeurism,'” he explained. “‘The act of paparazzism that takes the very mundane and through the grainy prism of a long lens casts this other light on it to make it look more glamorous and more sexy. Why does it fascinate people?'”
Affleck hoped that the themes of the video would resonate and register with audiences.
“The idea of that video was to sort of make people uncomfortable. To have this degree of voyeurism taking place that the audience watching the video would say, ‘This is sort of invasive. Why am I watching this? Why am I seeing these two people do this?’ and then kind of ask the question of themselves, ‘What is this process that we all do,’ and by doing so, satirize it,” he said.
But to his disappointment, the message of the video was lost among a good amount of people.
“That was the point. And still, some people recognized it as that and some people said, ‘Oh, this is just further exploitation of your personal life,'” he said.
Although Affleck didn’t want the attention he was getting, he felt there were ways he unintentionally fed into the tabloids. In hindsight, Affleck could see how some misinterpreted a younger Affleck’s actions.
“There were ways I did contribute to it, still kind of naively. Like these car dealerships would often say, ‘Hey, do you want to drive around a car? Go take it as long as you like. You can drive this Rolls-Royce for nothing, for free,'” he said. “The Boston kid in me thought, ‘This is great! What a deal! I can just drive this car around. Let my friends drive it.’ But then this image of a young guy in a Rolls-Royce was very off-putting to people. Probably be off-putting to me now if I saw it.”
Eventually, Affleck felt the only way to get some peace of mind was to escape from it all.
“I think I just ran away. You can only handle so much. I moved for a while to this place in Georgia that I have, was able to get away, by and large, from stuff. Come up with a plan for how to do something with my life that doesn’t put me in the crosshairs of this sort of thing,” he added.
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