How ‘Shotgun Wedding’ Made Jennifer Lopez the Perfect Dress Made for Action

For most of Jennifer Lopez’s action rom-com, “Shotgun Wedding,” she wears a wedding dress, and the challenge was to find the perfect color to wear in the new Amazon Prime movie.

The origin story of the dress is that it belonged to Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Carol, her future mother-in-law. Costume designer Mitchell Travers, who worked with Lopez on “Hustlers,” said he looked at how vintage wedding dresses age when he settled on the perfect color for the dress.

“I started looking at what happens to them over time. What would a 20 year old dress look like, a 40 year old dress, and they have this beautiful patina that starts to happen and they turn yellow with age. When you work with JLo, we don’t do that,” says Travers. “We went for a nice hot pink or, as I call it, ‘hot blush’.”

With this, Travers had the perfect canvas to shed “sweat, blood, dirt and everything that comes with action”.

“Shotgun Wedding” sees Lopez’s big day hijacked by hackers – literally. Set on an idyllic Philippine island, wedding guests, played by a cast of characters including Coolidge, D’Arcy Carden and Cheech Marin, are held hostage, while the bride and groom, played by Josh Duhamel, learn how to save their guests and their relationship.

Cue live grenades, zip line, lots of sand, a fight in the kitchen and much more. Lopez’s wedding dress had to be a character. “It goes through as much as the bride,” Travers says. “It had to reflect how she changes and what she learns.”

To come up with the design and form, Travers reverse-engineered everything. “I knew what I wanted for the idle run on the beach, so I had to go early.”

Travers says there was only one perfect dress and all other iterations of it had to work with the action sequence. For a sequence that involves driving a golf cart, Travers says the dress had to “envelop and overwhelm her. It’s the beginning of this day and she doesn’t know how she’s going to get out of it. Along with the zipline scene, another change was made to the dress. “It had to drag behind her and be chaotic.”

At the end of the film, when Lopez transforms into full-action mode and is ready to take on the pirates, Travers says, “We come to this revelation, where she’s lost her sleeves, she’s covered in blood, and I wanted the dress. be where she pulls her straps and where she is locked and loaded.

Travers said they had seven different versions of the dress that went through many phases of construction and deconstruction, whether it was removing the train, the sleeves or the skirt as the action unfolded. ensues.

“The dresses were constructed from 20-30 layers of stretchy netting. It’s a bit of a superhero costume that looks like a wedding dress,” Travers says of the ideal fabric used for the bespoke dress. “It gives him the ability to bend his body and move his arms and legs.”

As for the other Jennifer in “Shotgun Wedding,” Coolidge shot the film shortly after the first season of HBO’s “The White Lotus” wrapped, and Travers says he had no idea what was going on. was the show since it hadn’t aired at the time.

Her challenge for her was to find the perfect dress for a character who spends much of the film held captive in the infinity pool. “I just wanted her to be comfortable. I found a printed neoprene for her dress. It came with this huge shoulder, which we modified slightly. But that was the product of knowing the environment in which she was going to have to spin. He adds: “In a way it was like having her in the wetsuit because it was this perfect dress that she could get in and out of the water, have mobility and it always looked great when it was both dry and wet. Having that hugely exaggerated hat and shoulder helps me tell the story of someone who had never left their state and was so excited to be at a destination wedding.