Gloria Estefan wonders ‘what J. Lo would have said’ if she had joined Super Bowl show
Gloria Estefan, who turned down an offer to perform at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, responded Tuesday to Jennifer Lopez’s opinion that co-headlining the event with Shakira was “the worst idea in the world.”
On the latest episode of “Watch What Happens Live,” host Andy Cohen asked the veteran actor and musician for her thoughts on Lopez’s “Halftime” documentary, which premiered earlier this month on Netflix. In the film, the “Let’s Get Loud” singer laments the brief amount of time she and Shakira were each allotted for their shared halftime performance.
“Obviously I haven’t seen the doc yet, but I’ve heard about it,” Estefan told Cohen.
“This is the bottom line: You have very little time. You have like 12 minutes or something to get things on and off the set. So, could you do it [with] one person? Yes. But I think they wanted to throw a Miami and Latin extravaganza ... and they tried to pack in as much as possible, and they killed it. That was an amazing show.”
A scene in Jennifer Lopez’s Netflix documentary ‘Halftime’ shows the star agitated by how little time she and Shakira got at the 2020 Super Bowl.
The “Father of the Bride” star also explained her decision not to join Lopez and Shakira onstage, despite being asked to participate. Other artists who made cameos during the halftime program were Bad Bunny, J Balvin and Lopez’s child, Emme.
“Imagine what J. Lo would have said if I would have been a third?” Estefan mused, joking that she “literally would have come out” and sang only the opening lyrics of her smash hit “Conga” — “Come on, shake your body” — before her time onstage was up.
“It’s their moment,” she continued. “I’ve done a couple of Super Bowls. I didn’t want to go on a diet in December.”
In her “Halftime” documentary, Lopez protests the “six f— minutes” she and Shakira were each given to play their respective halftime sets. The “Marry Me” star adds that the National Football League should have doubled the halftime show length to accommodate double the headliners.
Echoing Lopez’s grievances in the doc is her longtime manager, Benny Medina, who argues that it was “an insult to say you needed two Latinas to do the job that one artist has historically done.”
“We have 30 seconds of a song, and if we take a minute, that’s it, we’ve got five left,” Lopez says. “But, there’s got to be certain songs that we sing, though. We have to have our singing moments. It’s not going to be a dance f— revue. We have to sing our message.”
As Estefan’s HBO Max remake debuts, she recalls her husband’s efforts to win over her mother: ‘No matter what he did — poor thing — she was brutal to him.’
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