Jennifer Lopez Recalls Emotional Moment With Her Father That ‘Healed’ Her Amid Ben Affleck Divorce

Jennifer Lopez had a healing moment with her father after she split from Ben Affleck.

On the Wednesday, June 10 episode of Brett Goldstein‘s Films to Be Buried With podcast, the “Jenny From the Block” singer, 56, sat down for a wide-ranging discussion with her Office Romance costar.

During the discussion, she recalled getting sick around Christmas and canceling a party she was supposed to host while her family was visiting her. Instead of socializing, Lopez isolated herself in her room.

“At that time of my life, I was going through a divorce and thinking a lot about my kids,” she admitted. “As you do when something like that happens in your life.”

Lopez decided to watch the Oscar-winning 2024 film I’m Still Here with her dad David, who, as she explained, was not one to sit down and watch movies.

“This woman spends her whole life trying to prove that her husband was really — that he didn’t just disappear,” Lopez explained of the main character, played by Fernanda Torres. “And went steadily on her way, raising all these kids on her own.”

Breaking down in tears on the podcast, the mom of two — who shares 18-year-old twins Max and Emme with ex-husband Marc Anthony — recalled becoming emotional during the film.

“My dad was sitting there, and something happened in my head, and I just started crying, where I started calculating all of the things with my kids, my experience with my dad, like everything happened just all at once,” Lopez recounted. “My whole family knew I was going through a hard time.”

“He gets up like nothing, you know, he’s like ‘Oh, that was a nice movie.’ He turns around, and he sees my face,” she remembered. “I was trying to cry quietly, so when you try to cry quietly, then it’s like all the tears, it’s like water gushing down my face.”

The Kiss of the Spider Woman actress said her dad asked her what was wrong, and she tearfully replied, “Dads are so important.”

“And he just kind of came over to me and grabbed my face, and he said, ‘I love you. I always loved you,'” she recalled. “That kind of changed my life in that moment because I think sometimes as kids, we don’t know if our parents love us enough, though we know they love us.”

“He knew that that’s what I needed to hear, and it healed a part of me that needed to be healed, to kind of move on from that part of my life and from those types of relationships in my life,” Lopez added. “That movie changed me and helped me grow and healed me in a way.”

Lopez and Affleck, 53, first dated in the early 2000s, then rekindled their romance in 2021, and married in 2022. The couple split in January 2024 and finalized their divorce in 2025.