Daniel: Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Jennifer: Thank you.
Daniel: Your new movie, Second Act takes on some pretty meaty workplace topics.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Daniel: The idea of your career being feeling stuck or barriers, either real or internal,
they’re stopping people from getting to where they want to get.
You have a million projects going on.
There’s so many different things you can do.
Why is this a story that you wanted to tell?
Jennifer: I just feel like it’s every person.
Somebody says, “Oh, it’s the every girl or the every woman,” but it’s every person.
There’s a time in all of our lives where we want to get ahead, where we have an ambition,
where we want to do more, where we want to succeed further.
And sometimes we hit a wall and we don’t know how to get past it.
And we realize at the end of it, hopefully, you get to the point where you realize the
only thing that’s stopping you is you.
And you can break through any barrier.
But sometimes that’s a long road, that’s a hard journey.
Daniel: Have you had that experience?
Jennifer: I mean for me, there’s been so many times because this business is pretty
unforgiving when it comes to being rejected.
You get rejected a lot.
I say for the 40-something movies I’ve done, I’ve gotten 100 no’s in between.
And that’s just the nature of what we do.
Maybe 400, who knows at this point.
But it’s definitely a feeling that I’m familiar with, yeah.
Daniel: One of the interesting parts about the character is that, she doesn’t have
a college degree.
She feels left out because she doesn’t have a college degree.
I’m curious, when you hire people, do you look for degrees?
Do you think it’s important?
Jennifer: It’s a yes and no question, right?
It’s great if somebody has an amazing education.
But I know from my own experience and my own life and other people that I work with, that
you don’t have to have a degree to have value or to be of tremendous worth to different
businesses.
That street smarts, that experience, that just kind of internal kind of creative know-how
is just as valuable as a degree.
And I think that’s what this movie deals with a lot, which is a great thing because
most people don’t have the privilege of getting that type of education.
I know I didn’t, nobody I knew growing up did, and still a lot of us have been successful.
Daniel: So do you make it a point, you have so many people working for you or working
with you, you can make choices about who’s on the set with you.
Are you working for degrees?
Do you actively go out and look for people who don’t have degrees?
Jennifer: I never did, I have to tell you.
I never did.
I always went more with vibe and energy.
And tell you the truth, it’s really about, I’m looking for a hard worker, a hard worker
who’s not afraid to work like 24 hours a day.
If that sounds crazy, it’s because we are.
I am and everybody who works for me as well.
And then recently as I’ve gotten more into kind of owning businesses and going from a
licensing model to an ownership model, I realize I need people who have more business experience.
And so yeah, I’ve been looking more at that lately.
Daniel: Would you talk a little bit about that moving from licensing to ownership?
What made you make that change, and what are you looking for?
Jennifer: I’ve been of the mind a long, long time that the way it’s done in Hollywood
and the way artists are kind of handled and taken care of, that there was something wrong
with the fact that we bring.
We are the scarce asset and we bring so much to the table and we usually get the smallest
piece of the pie.
And without us, nothing can really happen because they need the ideas, they need the
performer, they need all of this stuff, they need to creative and all that kind of everybody
is adding is the money.
And kind of money you can get anywhere in a sense, right?
In private equity world and in the business world it’s like, “Oh, it’s just money,
right?”
And you’re like, “Really?
It’s just money.
So I’m actually the thing that you need.”
Daniel: You’re the product, yeah.
Jennifer: Right, you’re the product.
I knew there was something wrong, I just didn’t know what it was.
It wasn’t until, really Alex came into my life and had such a nice grasp of the business
world, and so much experience in his own life in real estate and in business, and dealing
with private equity firms and things like that.
Where he was like, “Oh yeah, you’re right, it is wrong.”
This licensing model that we had been doing and quite successfully.
We maxed out.
I don’t think between me and my team, there was anybody who’s doing it in a more successful
way as far as I’m concerned.
We were hitting on all cylinders.
But deep down I knew that when I made a company almost $2 billion.
And I only came home.
Literally, I don’t even know what the percent… it had to be like 5% of that.
It may be less, much less.
Yeah, much less than that.
That there was something wrong.
Daniel: But at the time it must’ve felt.
You’re known for your negotiating skills.
You drive hard deals that benefit you.
Now when you look back, are there things you said, “Oh, I should have done that?”
Jennifer: We really weren’t driving hard deals.
I think we were the ones who were like, they were driving the hard deals and getting all
the money.
And we were kind of like, “Oh, thank you.”
There’s this thing with artists where we feel so much gratitude to be able to do what
we love to do, that we don’t give ourselves a value and worth that we deserve.
I think women do have this problem as well.
And I think now and in this moment in time, in this day and age, it’s shifting for women.
And I feel like it also has to shift for artists.
And they need to understand their worth and value as well.
And what they bring to the table, and need to own the things that they do as well.
Daniel: Your career path, I think if you look back, you’re incredibly successful, done
a lot of amazing things.
But you’ve had ups and downs in your career.
Jennifer: Oh, yeah.
Daniel: When you think back to those downs, is this the kind of thing that has a hangover
effect on you?
Were you’re like, “Oh, I don’t ever want to go through that again?”
How do you use those points in your career which weren’t great?
Jennifer: I look at them now, and I think you really just plowed through those.
And that’s the thing, it’s like you can’t stop.
You have to kind of keep on going.
Failure is not falling down and making a mistake, or choosing the wrong movie, or doing the
wrong thing at the wrong time.
It’s stopping.
Stopping is the failure not continuing forward is the failure.
Not keeping going until we don’t listen to our gut enough, telling us this is not
the right thing for you right now.
You’re doing this out of fear instead of out of love.
That’s usually when it went winds up in misery.
That’s the thing, I think that is the best thing to think about in those moments.
It’s like, am I doing this because I’m afraid of something or am I doing this because
of love?
And usually that’ll set you on the right path.
Daniel: You must have people asking you all the time, how to be the next Jennifer Lopez.
What kind of career advice do you give people?
Jennifer: It’s hard because there is no one set path for any one successful person.
I feel like everybody takes a different path.
There’s no actors that I talk to that go, “Oh, we all started at acting school and
then from there, we did plays.
And then from plays, we went to television.”
There’s like no one way to do it.
I started as a dancer, and then I thought I was going to do Broadway and I didn’t.
I did some tours abroad, and then I came back here and I got a job as fly girl on In Living
Color.
And then I started studying acting.
And then from there, I got my first television show, and my first development deal.
And then from there, I got my first movie.
There was a process to it that I couldn’t have predicted or planned or have said, “I’m
going to do this, this, this and this.”
It just all happened the way it happened.
And I think all you can do is know where you want to go and take steps every single day
in that direction, whatever that is.
And getting better at what you do and I think that gets you there.
Where that will take you, I cannot tell you.
But, I do know that if you just wake up every day and go, this is what I’m going to do,
this is what I’m going to be.
And today this is the thing that I’m doing to kind of keep going in that direction, eventually
you will get there.
Daniel: Do you think that your character in the movie does that?
Jennifer: I think that she’s given up a little bit.
I think she’s gotten to the point in her life where she’s been at this value club
shop for 15 years.
And for six years, she’s been the assistant manager and she knows she deserves a promotion
and she’s made the store better and she adds all this value.
And at the end of the day, she’s looked over by somebody who has an Ivy League degree.
And that really is her last blow.
And I know I’ve had that in my career, and that was after I was successful.
So that is a really true, honest thing that everybody can relate to, of where you get
stuck and almost give up.
Daniel: So is there one particular takeaway you want people to have when they leave the
theaters?
Jennifer: I think my favorite thing that people have said is that they leave the theater inspired.
They leave the theater inspired.
And that’s my favorite thing about being an artist in general.
Is that you can inspire people to dream their own biggest dreams.
Daniel: That’s great.
Well, Jennifer, thank you very much for joining us.
This is terrific.
Jennifer: Thank you, thank you so much.