Jennifer Lopez‘s new movie Atlas might be the final marker of happy days in her marriage to Ben Affleck.
Lopez’s Netflix project, which started streaming on Friday, May 24, follows a brilliant data analyst (Lopez) with a deep distrust of AI. After a mission to capture a renegade robot (Simu Liu) goes awry, she must use AI to save the future of humanity. The voice of the AI named Smith was voiced by Gregory James Cohan in the final version — but Affleck, 51, lent his voice in a pinch.
Sterling K. Brown, who starred in Atlas opposite Lopez, 54, opened up about Affleck’s offscreen assist, telling Entertainment Weekly, “Every once in a while, Ben would read the lines for Smith. And I think the newlyweds, still very much in love, I think she just wanted to hear his voice.”
Brown, 48, said Affleck’s presence helped Lopez, adding, “Sometimes, the reactions that you got from her were because she was listening to her husband’s voice.”
Affleck is no stranger to making appearances in his wife’s projects. Earlier this year, Affleck and Lopez’s romance was front and center in This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. The highly stylized take on Lopez’s life and accompaniment to her most recent album dove deep into their relationship in between self-help parodies and sci-fi interludes. Lopez shared that the project never would have made it off the ground without the encouragement of Affleck.
“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this,’” Lopez recalled at a press conference in February. “He was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are.'”
Lopez previously gushed over Affleck’s commitment to the project. “We collaborate very well together,” she told Entertainment Tonight in December 2023. “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.”
At the time, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that Lopez “wouldn’t have wished for anybody else” to collaborate with her on the Prime Video release, adding, “Nobody knows her better than Ben.”
Lopez felt “grateful” to have Affleck on her team, with the source saying, “He helped her feel safe to share parts of her nobody has ever known.”
Since the film debuted on Prime Video, Lopez and Affleck’s marriage has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. A second source recently told Us that the twosome hit a rough patch in their relationship.
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“Jen and Ben are having issues in their marriage,” the insider explained earlier this month. “They started having issues a few months ago as Jen had started ramping up work commitments and prepping for her tour.”
According to the source, Lopez is “very focused on work” ahead of her This Is Me … Live tour next month, adding, “They are on two completely different pages most of the time.”
Neither Lopez nor Affleck have directly addressed the speculation. Lopez, however, was asked about the rumors during a promotional event in Mexico, to which she replied, “You know better than that.”
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