Lopez, Anthony 'Cantante' in T.O. By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun

Here’s one of life’s lessons learned by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony while they were starring in El Cantante, playing salsa legend Hector Lavoe and his wife Puchi.

To wit: Don’t despair for your own marriage until you’ve walked in the shoes of an even more dysfunctional couple.

“I realized for the first time how sane we were as a couple — really,” recording-artist-turned-movie-star Anthony told a TIFF press conference yesterday, where he was joined by his co-star and producer J.Lo, director Leon Ichaso, and John Ortiz, who played Lavoe’s best friend and collaborator Willie Colon.

“As crazy as we are,” Lopez added with a giggle.

“We’d do these scenes and I’d go home and say, ‘We’re normal,’ ” Anthony went on.

Added Lopez: “And I was like, if they could do this for 20 years, surely we can make it through the next weekend.”

Lopez characterized her character as “a ballbuster.” But then Puchi Lavoe had to be. Her husband was a transcendent Puerto Rican musical figure who popularized a cross-cultural form of Latin jazz. “For people who couldn’t afford to go to the Copa, it was the voice of those people,” Anthony said. But Lavoe was a longtime drug addict who died penniless in 1993 of AIDS.

Nonetheless, he was still a cultural hero whose funeral in New York drew thousands of admirers. “I’d been hearing him since I was 3 or 4 years old. His music was like the soundtrack of my life,” Anthony said. “I got to meet him a couple of years before he died and I got a private viewing at his funeral. He’d said, ‘Don’t cry when I die, I want to hear a celebration.’ And you’d have had to have seen the people singing and dancing on the street, doing exactly what he asked them to.

“I had just put out my first salsa album six months before and it was doing very well. And when I walked out of his funeral, people started yelling, ‘It’s you now! You’re the next Hector.’ It was the scariest moment of my life. It’s scary and so powerful when people anoint you.” In fact, Anthony recorded all the Lovoe music in El Cantante.

The irony is that Anthony and Lopez had Hector Lavoe in common long before they were husband and wife. The project had been in Lopez’s producing file for nearly five years, and she met Puchi soon before her death, getting her blessing to play her. Ditto director Ichaso, who’d seen Lavoe perform on a number of occasions — memorably at Madison Square Garden with a rig that Mick Jagger had used the week before to float above the audience at a Stones concert. “He’s on stage having a fight over whether he’s going up, and they hoisted him up and I said, ‘This man’s gonna vomit.’ Instead you could see him laughing,” said Ichaso, who said Anthony has Lavoe’s eyes and his sense of humour.

But not his weight. The filmmakers gave up early on the idea of Anthony putting on a fat suit to play the hefty salsa superstar. “We decided Marc is going to become Hector and Hector’s going to become Marc,” Ichaso said.

“It would have been a challenge to get me to gain weight,” Anthony admitted. “My mom’s been trying for 38 years.”

So what did the two Puerto Rican American superstars learn about each other doing a movie together? “I always knew Marc was a fantastic actor,” she said about her nouveau movie star spouse. “Nobody could sing like that with all that passion and all that feeling (and not be). There was so much in there that he could bring to a leading role and he had never been given an opportunity.”

As for Anthony, he said of his singer/actress/producer wife: “I’ve been in the business 27 years, and I’ve never met anybody with such laser focus and clarity. I’m more laid-back, Hectorian, and it’s just fascinating to me. She does not do anything halfway. That’s really a virtue I think. She’s just as passionate in her meetings about perfume. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Turning to her, he added, “You’re quite an amazing woman, baby.”

All together now. Awwwww.



This story was posted on Thu, September 14, 2006