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While Jennifer Lopez was rehearsing day and night in preparation for her Super Bowl halftime performance earlier this year, her fiancé, Alex Rodriguez , just wanted to stay out of her way.
It‘s been almost seven months since the star performed alongside Shakira in Miami for their Emmy-nominated halftime show, completely wowing everyone in the building at Hard Rock Stadium and the millions watching on their televisions at home. Now, A Rod is sharing some never-before-heard details about everything that led up to the iconic performance, including his contributions.
During an interview on Barstool Sports’ The Corp podcast, which is co-hosted by Rodriguez, Lopez told some stories about the preparation that came with the huge career milestone for his future wife, which included him ignoring J. Lo the morning of the game.
“We went to the gym that morning and I was driving her and she was talking to me. I was ignoring her,” Rodriguez recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m not getting in the way of anything. It’s your day and focus. We’ll talk Monday,’ and she was like, ‘You can still talk to me.’”
But, as Lopez has acknowledged in the past, the preparation for this performance in particular was extremely intense.
“Leading up to it was probably the most nerve-wracking—and Alex can attest to this—high stress moments of my whole career. I could never have imagined it would be that stressful,” Jennifer explained. “I think it’s because everybody understands the weight of it and the fact that it is 100 percent live and a thousand different things could go wrong, and so people feel that and everybody you work with feels that and everybody’s on edge and everybody’s like at each other’s throats and things like that. So, it was pretty intense, but I love the people I work with and we literally got so much closer from doing that show than maybe anything in the past 10 years.”
Luckily, Lopez was already in the zone when the time finally arrived--and as we saw with our own eyes, she absolutely killed her performance.
“Leading up to it, I think I was more nervous than on the day,” she continued. “You know, for me, preparation meets the moment and I was so prepared that in the moment I was just like ready to go. I was like a thoroughbred in the gates. It was just like, please let me out of the gates. Please let me go. But, I stood there and I also get very calm.”
Looks like Alex’s strategy worked out pretty well.