Mariah Carey Hopes to Get ‘One Up’ on Rival Jennifer Lopez by Relaunching Acting Career: Source (Exclusive) 

Mariah Carey is quietly plotting an acting comeback, a source exclusively tells Star, and she wants to outshine longtime nemesis Jennifer Lopez while she’s at it!

“She’d love nothing more than to build a new chapter with her acting career, which would come with the fringe benefit of getting one up on J.Lo, with whom she’s still ferociously competitive,” the source spills.

While Carey’s 2001 musical, Glitter, was a box-office flop and earned her a Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress, the source says she had a “brilliant performance” in 2009’s Precious still receives “compliments” on it.

The “Emotions” singer, 56, has been contacting people about “making more noise in the movie space,” after spending the last decade focusing on “lucrative holiday-themed live” shows, the source explains, adding that it’s a “great business” but “monotony has set in.”

For Carey, acting is also more “preferable to the alternative” – spending the next few years on a “wide-ranging documentary looking back at her whole career,” the source tells Star.

“There’s a time and a place for that kind of project,” continues the source, “and Mariah just isn’t ready to go there just yet — she still has more chapters to write for herself!”

Carey has not explicitly publicly confirmed her alleged decades-long feud with Lopez – in her famed words, “I don’t know her” – but tension between the divas was rumored to have started in the late ’90s after the “On the Floor” singer, 56, collaborated with record executive Tommy Mottola around the time of his divorce from Carey.

Lopez personally denied the rumors of a feud during a 2014 appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.

“I know from back in the day, I’ve read things that she’s said about me that were not the greatest, but we have never met. Like, we don’t know each other,” she said. “I think it’s kind of from word of mouth of things that have happened in the past that I’m not really aware of.”

“I would love to meet her, and I would love to be friends with her,” she said at the time. “I think she’s incredibly talented, and I’ve always been a fan of hers.”

However, in a 2018 sit-down with Pitchfork, Carey once again hinted at the supposed feud, claiming that when she said she didn’t know Lopez, she was “trying to say something nice or say nothing at all.”