This Jennifer Lopez Movie Wouldn't Have Happened Without Her

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When Héctor Babenco's "Kiss of the Spider Woman" premiered at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, it was an immediate sensation due to the remarkable performances of William Hurt, Raúl Julia, and Sônia Braga, as well as an expertly crafted screenplay by Leonard Schrader (the brother of Paul Schrader). The film performed surprisingly well at the box office (despite its radical political content and, gasp, fully realized portrayal of a homosexual at a time when America was ignorantly blaming the gay community for the AIDS epidemic), and wound up earning four Academy Award nominations. The late William Hurt won Best Actor for his performance as the gay Luis Molina, whose cinephilia ultimately captivates Julia's political prisoner Valentin Arregui, resulting in both tragedy and a kind of deliverance. The film lost Best Picture to Sydney Pollack's plodding "Out of Africa," but it left a deep groove in the culture.

In 1992, musical theater maestros John Kander and Fred Ebb ("Cabaret," "Chicago") teamed with playwright Terrence McNally (who, at the time, was Broadway's most prominent chronicler of the lives of gay men) for an adaptation of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" that departed from Babenco's movie and went straight back to Manuel Puig's 1976 novel. And they correctly understood (which Babenco kinda-sorta missed) that the character of Aurora, the silver-screen diva, whose femme fatale performances provide him with momentary escape from his horrific conditions. In the musical, Valentin is finally taken with Molina's tales of Aurora, and how could he not be? In the original Broadway production, she was played by the legendary Chita Rivera!

I want to say it's strange that it took over 30 years to get a big-screen adaptation of a celebrated Broadway musical that was nominated for 11 Tonys and won seven, but "Kiss of the Spider Woman" doesn't scald your conscience with its politics like "Cabaret." And it's got one more problem: There's only one Chita Rivera, and by the time director Bill Condon got around to making his take on the Kander-Ebb musical, she was gone, having died in January 2024 at the age of 91. If Condon had a shot at getting his film made, he had to find a big-name Latin performer who could match the diva brilliance of Rivera. Condon's wish list consisted of one actor, and he got her.

Bill Condon began developing his version of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" a decade ago, and, as he recently told The Hollywood Reporter, he had to wait to find the right star who was willing to make the film as an independent production. Financing a movie like this means you've got to find a star who plays to the widest audience imaginable, and given that the character is a mature woman (Chita Rivera was 60 when she played Aurora), you can't cast the pop idol flavor of the week.

So it was Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Lopez only. In his interview with THR, Condon bluntly stated:

"Jennifer Lopez is the reason this movie got made. There's only one person who could play this diva. We don't have that many divas. I can count them on one hand. And then how many of them are great dancers, singers and Latin? I think there's only one. She handed our producer the Golden Globe for 'Dreamgirls,' and I met her that night. She was talking about how much she wanted to make musicals. So, I just had this faith that this would speak to her."

Condon's "Kiss of the Spider Woman" received mostly enthusiastic notices at last January's Sundance Film Festival, though it sounds like newcomer Tonatiuh might've walked away with the movie as Molina. Still, awards season is a wild horse race, and I've a feeling the Academy is still (rightfully) feeling shame for having failed to nominate Lopez for her transcendent performance in Lorene Scafaria's "Hustlers." Don't count Lopez out, and never bet against Condon when he's working within the musical genre. No one loves it or gets it as emphatically as he does.