Celebrity
Ben Affleck Is Unrecognizable In J.Lo’s New Movie
He appears sporadically throughout the film and in its post-credits scene.
Spoilers ahead for This Is Me... Now: A Love Story. Jennifer Lopez’s new film This Is Me... Now: A Love Story features a huge roster of chaotic guest stars, from Jane Fonda and Post Malone to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. To top it off, Lopez’s real-life husband, Ben Affleck, also sneaks in, but you might not recognize him.
He first appears in the film’s beginning. After J.Lo rides through desert trains on a motorcycle with her biker lover, she gets into an epic crash. A few seconds later, he appears as newscaster Rex Stone.
Stone sporadically pops up throughout the film, which is available on Prime Video, but because of Affleck’s makeup and prosthetics, he’s well-disguised. At one point, the character laments how nobody asks “what is love?” anymore — at least on Google. Instead, the top Google questions include things like “how you like me now?,” “is Europe a country?,” and “am I pregurant?” (spelling error intended).
Affleck’s big moment comes midway through the credits, after his identity is revealed. He gives a strange but touching monologue about self-love.
“Loving yourself means never having to say ‘I’m lonely,’” he says. “It means ol’ Rexie can go down to the lobby bar, order the oysters and a club soda, and go to bed smiling, even though the waitress was as mean as a diabetic honeybadger. ’Cause only you can let the love in your heart die, and you should never let it die.”
This Is Me... Now tells Lopez’s perspective on her and Affleck’s decades-long love story. She tells a fictional account of her three prior marriages and the work she did on herself before reconciling with him in 2021. They married in July 2022.
While Affleck, an Oscar-winning writer, is not credited as a writer on the film, Lopez did consult him on how to tell their story. “Nobody knows my story more than he does,” she told Entertainment Tonight in December. “So we were able to kind of sit down and really dig into it, in a way that I don’t think any other writer could’ve done with me.”
