Interview with Jennifer Lopez

On Acting in and Executive Producing SHADES OF BLUE, Being the Boss, Diversity on TV, and Fitting in AMERICAN IDOL and Vegas

Q: You had your current television series SHADES OF BLUE (based on a novel by Michael Rudolph called Shades of Blue: 30 Years of (Un)ethical Policing) completely filmed before it went on the air, right?

JL: Yes.

Q: Did that make it especially unnerving— wondering what the reception would be?

JL: It was nerve-racking. Just doing the show itself was very challenging. Doing a one-hour drama is probably one of the hardest gigs in show business, and it’s very demanding, and a show like this is such an emotional roller coaster for me and for a lot of the characters. It’s very challenging — not knowing whether people are going to embrace the show. At the end of the day, you just have to give it your all, put your heart into it, put everything on the line, and see what happens. That’s how I approach everything, anyway.

Q: You mentioned the workload. And, obviously, a one-hour drama, everyone says it’s the biggest grind, but were you noticing things that you are weren’t seeing in film scripts that made you say, “OK, I want to see what I can do with a full TV series run, to actually play a character that I’m not seeing on the movies?”

JL: To be honest, for me, right now, the best movies are on television. The characters are better. The stories, like you say, have more opportunities to explore things. It was just a really exciting opportunity to do something that I hadn’t done in a while in a different way than I had done in a long time. For me, the script itself, the story itself, the idea of it from the very first time I spoke about it with my producing partner Elaine Goldsmith Thomas — I knew that there was something that could go on. It just had enough of a base to really grow into something that hopefully, never gets boring.