Jennifer Lopez says she just missed being part of an iconic awards show moment.
The “Hustlers” star told E! News in a recent interview that she was originally slated for one of the onstage kisses Madonna shared with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.
“I was filming a movie in Canada, and we had met — me, [Madonna] and Britney — to do it at her home, and then I just couldn’t get off the film,” Lopez told the celebrity news outlet. “So, we couldn’t do it. They got Christina Aguilera, I think, to do it, and I didn’t wind up doing it.”
Lopez didn’t name the film she was working on, but her 2004 movies “Jersey Girl” and “Shall We Dance” were filming in Canada around that time.
At New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, meanwhile, a different kind of performance took center stage on Aug. 28, 2003.
Spears and Aguilera first took the stage to perform Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” and then the Queen of Pop joined them for her song “Hollywood.” Before Missy Elliott came out to perform “Work It,” the trio took a beat for Madonna to kiss Spears and then Aguilera.
“Shock value gets more and more extreme or whatever,” Aguilera reportedly told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2020. “But honestly, at the time, yeah, I never thought anything of it. It was like, ‘OK, it’s two girls kissing.’ It wasn’t shocking back then. It’s not shocking now, to me.”
What did surprise Aguilera was the frenzy Spears and Madonna’s kiss had garnered over her own. MTV cut from the stage to the crowd after Spears’ kiss to get her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake’s reaction — thus failing to broadcast Aguilera’s smooch with Madonna.
“And you know why they cut it?” Aguilera told Andy Cohen in 2018 during an interview on his SiriusXM “Radio Andy” show. “They cut away to get Justin’s reaction. I saw the newspaper the next day and it was like, ‘Oh — well, I guess I got left out of that one.’”
Meanwhile, Spears fielded incessant questions about the kiss for the rest of the year. She reportedly told CNN that September that she “didn’t know it was going to be that long and everything,” she doesn’t “go home and have orgies,” and that she “never kissed a woman before.”
Spears added at the time that she probably “would not do it again” unless it was with Madonna — which she did during her wedding ceremony to Sam Asghari last year.
As for Lopez, who recently tied the knot herself, it’s all gravy.
“I love Madonna,” Lopez told E! News. “I’m a huge fan. I always have been.”