Jennifer Lopez and her ex-husband Marc Anthony soon discovered they needed to synchronize their acting approaches in ‘El Cantente’.

Jennifer Lopez worked with her ex-husband Marc Anthony for the first time in the feature El Cantente. But she quickly discovered that their acting styles weren’t exactly compatible.

Lopez acted alongside her husband for the first time in the 2006 biopic El Cantante. The feature was about the life of salsa singer Hector Lavoe, which was told from the perspective of his wife Pucci. Being the producer of the film as well, Lopez actually cast Anthony as Hector before she ended up casting herself as his wife.

“I knew that he was the guy to play the role, so I called him a month later, and I asked him if he wanted to attach himself to this,” Lopez once told Ok!. “At that time, I didn’t even know I was going to play Pucci to tell you the truth. But I did know that I wanted it to be the first thing I produced. So I called him as the producer of the film, and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and he said, ‘Yes, of course. This guy’s my idol.’ I’m like Ok,” she remembered.

It was mentioned that she and Anthony also had a lot of chemistry together on screen, something that was a byproduct of their innate synergy. “We met working. That’s what everybody forgets. The first time we met we were doing a song together, and it worked. It was on my first album. We have chemistry naturally, luckily. We always planned to do this film together, even when we weren’t together,” she added.

Their different acting styles did present a challenge, however. They both were actors, although Lopez was the far more experienced of the two. And over the years, she developed certain conditions for acting that clashed with Anthony’s way of performing.

“We have different acting styles. He’s kind of a method actor, he likes to improvise. He says, ‘Don’t worry, just go with it.’ I’m very disciplined. I know all my lines, I know all his lines,” Lopez once told Irish Examiner.

The Wedding Planner star confided that she and Anthony became a little too immersed in their fight scenes while filming. The pair had their share of arguments in real life the way most couples did. Still, their fights were nothing like the wars that their onscreen couples had. Lopez admitted that she was the one at fault for ramping up the tension between herself and Anthony.

“While we were shooting one of the scenes actually when she comes home and she sees that he’s been getting high in the house and the son is there we were shooting that scene and she starts arguing,” Lopez recalled. “I start going after him. Now, obviously, a lot of stuff we did was improvised. They were like ëyou two go at it.’ I decided that I was going to literally go after Marc in one scene. I did it the first take, and I didn’t really go after him, and then in the second take, I decided I was just going to push him and I wanted to get him out of the house. Just get out! Because he wanted to leave. I pushed him. He’s not expecting it or anything and he starts struggling.”

When Anthony reacted, the set’s crew had to separate the two and snap the couple back into reality.

“He grabs my arm, and I’m like let go! Let go of my arm right now,” Lopez said. “And we start getting into it. All of a sudden he’s like ‘Jennifer!’ I’m calling him Hector, he’s calling me Jennifer, and suddenly the whole set just breaks up because it was so tense. They were like, ‘Do you guys get into fights like this at home?’ No, not like this.”