MARC ANTHONY had plenty of warning about the dangers of starring opposite his wife, Jennifer Lopez, in the story of a troubled celebrity couple from salsa's golden era. Fellow actors cautioned him that the marital conflicts in the script were bound to creep into his own relationship as some sort of evil projection on his marriage.
"Everybody said the same thing: 'Oh, working with your wife is going to be challenging,' " he recalls. " 'It's a rough script, man, and you're going to have to go to these [tormented] places.' "
Marc Anthony wasn't yet married to Lopez when he agreed to star as the late Hector Lavoe, the beloved but bedeviled salsa singer in "El Cantante" (The Singer), a Picturehouse release that opens Friday. His future wife would not just be his costar as the sharp-tongued Puchi, Lavoe's codependent spouse -- Lopez would also be his boss, since she was producing the movie as the maiden project of her company, Nuyorican Productions. The warnings gave him second thoughts about the deal. "Man, I thought I had signed a death sentence," he recalled.
But the singer plunged into the role with passion, bearing an uncanny resemblance on screen to the wiry Puerto Rican icon he calls his idol. "El Cantante" shows Lavoe's rise to fame as part of New York's salsa boom of the '60s and '70s and his almost simultaneous self-destruction through drug abuse and paralyzing self-doubt. Lavoe's talent and bravado made him an instant folk hero for the era's socially conscious Latin American youth. Yet his human failings and miserable luck made him a tragic figure who lost his mother as a boy, met with heartless rejection from his father as an adult, became hooked on heroin, buried a teenage son killed in a gun accident, contracted AIDS, tried to commit suicide and met an early death at age 46.
This story is told in flashbacks by a world-worn but still feisty Puchi, who is being interviewed after Lavoe's death. Played with convincing New York attitude by Lopez, Puchi recounts her husband's infidelities, his reputation for showing up late (if at all) to concerts, her heroic efforts to rescue him from scary shooting galleries and her blind enabling by sharing his drug habits.
A rough script indeed. How could Marc Anthony and Lopez inhabit such dark characters during shooting in New York and not take some of that turmoil back to their pastoral Long Island estate at night?
