Any bride knows it’s all about the dress. Such is the case in Jennifer Lopez’s new movie Shotgun Wedding, which starts streaming today on Prime Video.
In the flick, which also stars Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz and Josh Duhamel, Lopez dons a custom-made Galia Lahav gown. The only catch? The designer had to make twenty-eight of them.
Since the entire movie takes place on the same day, lead costume designer Mitchell Travers (Hustlers, The Amazing Spiderman 2) was tasked with making a dress that could not only survive the elements (much of the shooting was done in a giant pool in the Dominican Republic), but also one that could morph into different versions, depending on what was happening in the scene.
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“The entire movie was a costume designer’s red flag,” jokes Travers, while speaking with HelloGiggles from a production set in LA. Travers tells us it took 50 people on set to make the dress appear realistic in each scene.
Shotgun Wedding follows a couple (Duhamel and Lopez) that’s headed for a dreamy destination wedding in the Philippines, which inevitably turns to disaster when the entire party is captured and held hostage. “Action, rom-com, adventure, it’s a little bit of everything!,” says E! Entertainment host Justin Sylvester, who hosted the press junket for the film.
“Darcy and Tom start out with cold feet and different ideas of what marriage should be, but along the way they really discover each other,” Lopez shares.
Prime Video shares this behind-the-scenes featurette featuring director and cast commentary on the Lionsgate movie EXCLUSIVELY with HelloGiggles.
Travers was tapped for the film back in 2020, smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was essentially closed for business. Bridal brand Galia Lahav essentially agreed to shut down their operations for a month and half, so they could painstakingly hand-stitch each copy of the dress.
“I worked backwards with this one. We needed to turn Darcy into this bad a*ss action star by the end of the film, but the dress needs to look beautiful throughout, even when tattered and covered with blood. There were all of these different dress moments I knew had to design for,” says Travers. “The dress evolves with the movie.”
Once the dresses were made, next came the task of figuring out how to deconstruct and modify each one to fit the corresponding scenes. For example, in one scene, Lopez goes through Die Hard-style action scenes, so in one instance, the dress needed to be slashed and missing a sleeve. In another, it was spattered with blood. Not to mention, the stars are soaking wet in many scenes, which presents an additional challenge.
“I really felt like the dress itself was a character in the movie, but also representative of what she was going through,” says the “I’m Real” singer.
“Through the dress, it represents my character Darcy peeling back layers of her character, as pieces of her dress came off,” she explains. “By the end, she’s like this bad a*s and she’s taken off the hair extensions and she’s got a gun and she’s like alright now, everybody listen to me!” Lopez says with a laugh.
They say art imitates life, and in J. Lo’s real-life, she had two weddings in 2022 with hubby Ben Affleck, revealing to fans in her On the JLo newsletter that it was Affleck’s idea to elope to Las Vegas because it was so “stressful” planning their Georgia affair. In Vegas, Lopez says she donned a “dress from an old movie” that she’d pulled out of her closet for the midnight ceremony.
Both of the couple’s weddings went off without a hitch — a far cry from the chaotic but hilarious Shotgun Wedding.
