Jennifer Lopez leads stars on ELLE’s Women In Hollywood cover shoot

Jennifer Lopez has graced the cover of ELLE’s Women In Hollywood issue and looks stunning in a series of images in which she models some incredibly powerful looks. 

The singer, actress, mother and businesswoman, 54, spoke about how ‘women get sexier as they get older’ and said she ‘might work until she is 90.’ 

Jennifer, or J-Lo as she is often known, posed naked under a semi-sheer red lace dress which had a plunging detail at the front for one exquisite image 

She also wore a gold lamé one-shoulder dress to appear on the cover of the magazine, which also features the likes of Eva Longoria, Taraji P. Henson, America Ferrera and Jodie Foster, to name a few.

On the growing number of roles for older women, Jennifer said: ‘People have realized that women just get sexier as they get older. 

‘They get more learned and more rich with character. All of that is very beautiful and attractive, and not just physically, but on the inside, the beauty that you gain as you get older, the wisdom you gain.’

She continued: ‘I see myself working [as long as] I want to. I don’t know what that age is. It might be 70, it might be 80, it might be 90, I don’t know. 

‘But I know that it’s there for me if I want it and I want to create it. That has always been the mindset that I’ve had: to never let anybody put me in a box because of where I was born, where I’m from, what age I am, anything like that. Those boundaries don’t exist for me.’

Jennifer looked incredible wearing a red plunging leotard, pulling a sheer red fabric across her body for the landscape shot. 

She also wore a daring black gown, going braless underneath the number, which had a huge keyhole at the cleavage, among other racy designer numbers. 

During the interview, Jennifer also admitted she wishes she knew certain things before breaking out in Hollywood.  

She said: ‘One of those things was to be more particular with my choices. And I didn’t have that luxury, being Latina. I didn’t get called in for everything someone who wasn’t Latina would get called in for. I got called in for very specific things. 

‘As I started getting more leads here and there, I should have pulled back. I took that mindset with me instead of going, “I should only work with certain kinds of directors that I really want to work with. I should choose this material in a different way.” 

‘I just wasn’t as particular as I could be, I think. And if I [could] start over, I think I would’ve done that. I would’ve known that the director is really the helm of the project when you’re acting. 

‘Just like in singing, the producers you work with are very important. I knew that with music, but I didn’t quite understand it as much when I was younger about directors.’

The icon is aiming to do everything the men do and these days, she is choreographing her own story. With her company Nuyorican Productions, she has produced projects including Hustlers, the Netflix film The Mother, and TV series like The Fosters and Shades of Blue. 

She said: ‘I want to tell the gamut of stories. Uplifting, empowering stories, and entertaining stories, and gangster movies. I want to do everything that men do. I want to do all of it.’

She doesn’t like the notion that women only want to see love stories or romantic comedies. ‘I think that’s insulting.’

‘Women, she points out, have been leaders of countries. We have run empires; we have done all of these things throughout history, and we should tell all of those stories.’

On making projects for and about women, she added: ‘People were laying the groundwork for this for a long time. It’s just that sometimes it takes time to move these mountains and these old ideas and paradigms and shift them to a place where there’s real change. 

‘We have been able to stand in our own power and say, We’re not going to be taken advantage of. We’re not just on the corners of life or on the outside of the stories. We are the stories.’

Read more in ELLE’s 2023 Women in Hollywood December/January 2023 issue.