Kevin Smith can’t say if the dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to her first of two wedding celebrations with new husband Ben Affleck was from the poster from Jersey Girl, as the internet has been theorizing in recent weeks.
“Maybe it was that, I didn’t ask,” Smith told Yahoo Entertainment Tuesday at a virtual press day for his latest film, Clerks III, about the connection being drawn to Jersey Girl, the 2004 comedy that he directed and in which the famous duo co-starred (watch above). “When I saw them I wasn’t like, ‘Hey man, can you settle the internet for me? This would be good for my brand!'”
Smith saw the newlyweds at their second wedding this past weekend at Affleck’s sprawling estate in Georgia where the power duo was originally going to get married before breaking up in 2004. (The director subsequently cut their wedding scene out of Jersey Girl, afraid it would distract viewers.)
This time, Smith tells us, it was the stuff of a classic Hollywood romance.
“I was so overwhelmed by the wedding itself,” he says. “I’m a big fat romantic at heart, so I love love. And they’ve got a fantastic love story that now has this beautiful ending – not ending, beginning, almost. They stuck the landing, closed the circle, so to speak.
“So I was going by virtue of the fact that, ‘Yay, I get to see what we almost saw many years ago. Good for these kids. They figured it out.’ What I got though was profoundly moving. We got a show that, a lot of people pay cash money to go see a movie that makes them feel that good. It makes them believe in love… We got it for free, man. We just went and watched our friend get married and it was one of the most profoundly beautiful f***ing moments of my life, and it didn’t even happen to me.”
Smith was particularly moved watch his longtime friend Affleck, whom he first directed in 1995’s Mallrats, look so happy. They’ve made several memorable movies together, also including Chasing Amy (1997) and Dogma (1999) – though the pair later hit a rough patch before rekindling their friendship and creative partnership when the actor cameo’ed in 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. (He also cameos in Clerks III.)
“I’ve known this cat going on 27 years – we met when he came in to audition for Mallrats, and then we became friends,” Smith says. “He’s one of my favorite people on the planet, one of my favorite artists, one of my favorite writers. That’s why I was so blissful during their wedding, because they wrote vows together, and he wrote a big speech, and I was like, ‘Oooh, I’ll listen to Ben Affleck read his speech all day long.
“I’ve seen him be happy. This is a guy who won Oscars… I ain’t ever seen a human being, let alone him, as happy as he was when he was standing there and she’s walking [down the aisle]… It was moving. I was bawling from that moment forward.”
Smith only has well-wishes for the happy couple.
“Jennifer Lopez is one of the luckiest people on the planet,” he says. “She just f***ing got Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck is a catch.”
-Video produced by Kyle Moss and edited by Luis Saenz
Clerks III opens Sept. 13.
Watch the trailer:
