Somehow I Snuck Into a Scene in J.Lo's Documentary
On 'Halftime,' Ben's presence, A-Rod's absence, and her Oscar snub.
I was minding my own business the other afternoon, watching the J.Lo doc Halftime on Netflix when I heard: my own voice! I had a soundbite pulled into the documentary’s section about J.Lo not getting nominated for the Oscar she should’ve won for Hustlers: “When you’re voting for someone to win an Oscar,” I’d said, “you have to know that they need it. And with J.Lo, I mean, she’s already an icon.” My V.O. plays over an excerpt from a Kyle Buchanan column, titled “Why Did the Oscars Ignore Jennifer Lopez in ‘Hustlers’?” (“Lopez is seen more as a celebrity than an actress,” he’d posited, and that the Super Bowl gig actually hurt her chances: “That gig is a major coup for Lopez as a performer, but it reinforced the perception that acting isn’t her primary profession.”) You can hear it about an hour and eight minutes in.
My friend Meg Zukin, formerly a social editor for Variety, was also featured in the doc. Obviously we had to get on FaceTime and talk about our surprise appearances. Here are excerpts from that conversation.
Hunter Harris: Ok, we’re gathered here today because we were both in the J.Lo documentary. How did you find out you were in it?
Meg Zukin: Matt Donnelley, of Variety fame, sent me photos of myself in the documentary. Later, Ramin Setoodeh sent me photos and alerted me of my appearance.
HH: Oh, we love Ramin! Hung Up loves Ramin.
MZ: How did you find out?
HH: Someone I know who works at Netflix texted me like a month ago and was like, “Um, did I just hear your voice in this J.Lo documentary?” And I was like, “LMAO, no.” I mean, I knew I hadn't recorded anything for it, but I don't even know what I would've been talking about in it.
And then I watched it and I heard something that sounded like my voice. Keeping in mind that someone already thought that I was in this, I was like, “Was that just my fucking voice?” And I went back and it totally was my voice, like sped up to 1.5 speed, which was funny. But tell the story of your clip, like your scene, because it’s great.