An interviewer ruffled the feathers of some audience members after he awkwardly joked about Jennifer Lopez “getting up there” in age during a screening for her new film, Unstoppable.
“Listen, I can’t believe it’s been 30 years since Selena,” Variety’s senior awards editor, Clayton Davis, told Jen on Sunday during a Q&A, in a video obtained by TMZ.
He was referencing her starring role in the 1997 biopic about the late singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez.
J-Lo initially replied with a simple: “Wow.” His comment was met with audible gasps and some laughter from the apparently befuddled crowd.
“Did he just say that?” someone can be heard muttering. Another person in the audience can be heard calling the comment “rude”.
“It’s funny you think that I’m getting up there,” Jen began, prompting Davis to quickly clarify that he’d meant the comment as a “joke”.
The star then pivoted to thanking to her fans for sticking beside her during her lengthy career.
“I want to say thank you, you guys. Because we’ve been doing this a long time together,” she told the crowd. “Today, I was singing some new songs and I went back and sang If You Had My Love, which is my first song, from 1999. It’s that thing of, like, ‘what a journey this has been’.”
In Unstoppable, Jen plays the mother of a young wrestling prodigy born with one leg.
Noting that she feels “the best is yet to come,” the singer and actor added: “I honestly feel that my creativity and who I am as an artist — like you said, I also feel that [Unstoppable], for me, was another kind of level for me of going deeper into who I am as a person, as an artist.”
HuffPost has reached out to Variety and Jennifer Lopez’s reps for comment.