“How Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh brought Kiss of the Spider Woman to the screen“
Jennifer Lopez stuns in new promotional photoshoot for Kiss of the Spiderwoman for Out Magazine and serving iconic looks once again! 🌟 The superstar graces the cover of Out Magazine (2025) in a breathtaking new photoshoot tied to her upcoming film Kiss of the Spiderwoman.
✨ The Out Magazine is out now, and the full film release of Kiss of the Spiderwoman is on the horizon and is set to release in October.
It’s a scene that might have taken place in a Kiss of the Spider Woman fantasy sequence. Jennifer Lopez, who plays the movie star Ingrid Luna in Bill Condon’s upcoming musical drama film — as well as the dual characters Ingrid portrays in the musical inside-the-musical, Aurora and the Spider Woman — reclines on a sofa at the Maybourne, a Beverly Hills hotel. White flowers sit nearby on a table, as members of her team look on.
Behind Lopez in a tuxedo is Tonatiuh. His Spider Woman character, a queer window dresser named Luis Molina, mentally escapes the confines of an Argentinian prison by retelling the plot of a film starring their favorite diva. In these sequences, Molina, jailed for public indecency with a man, transforms into Kendall Nesbit to sing and dance alongside Aurora. They’re accompanied in these reveries by Valentin (Diego Luna), their cellmate and a political revolutionary who manifests his own dream doppelgänger as Aurora’s love interest, Armando (though back in prison, there may be some interest in Molina as well). Love and sacrifice, both found through a kiss, figure in this layered story.
The Out shoot was held in June, just days after Lopez took the stage at WorldPride DC, where she performed “Kiss of the Spider Woman” alongside hits like “On the Floor” and “Let’s Get Loud” that launched her to global stardom and gay icon status. It’s a title she takes seriously. “I’m so happy to be able to be here to celebrate community, diversity, love, and freedom,” she told her fans from the stage. Cue to a cover of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90,” as well as a new track from Lopez, “Free,” which declares “I’m free / Free to love whoever I please.”
Performing at WorldPride was a “special” experience for Lopez. “I was there for no other reason than just to show my support and love and solidarity [during] everything that’s going on in our country right now, which is absurd on so many levels — not just for the LGBTQ community but for the Latino community,” she says. “As an artist, you show up in the ways that you can. And when they asked me to do it, I was like, I will absolutely fucking be there.”
For Lopez, Spider Woman presented another opportunity for musical allyship in a time when the LGBTQ+ community is under renewed political assault — particularly trans and gender-nonconforming people of color like Molina. “What drew me to this story? First of all, the story’s about love, right?” Lopez says. “It’s the one thing in life that is really worth dying for in a way, and that’s really the poetry of the movie to me.”
The story, as first written in Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, was groundbreaking for its themes of queer love and political resistance in the face of an oppressive dictatorship. As a central character, Molina defied cultural norms about gender and sexuality, characteristics that assured the book was widely banned upon its release. (Some modern critics also take issue with the novel’s tropes and lengthy footnotes categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness.)
But the Spider Woman story has evolved with the times while maintaining its cultural resonance. William Hurt won an Oscar for portraying Molina in the 1985 film adaptation. In the theater world, Spider Woman appeared onstage in a 1983 play penned by Puig as well as a Tony-winning 1993 musical scored by John Kander and Fred Ebb, with a book by Terrence McNally. This fall, the film adaptation of this musical will be released in an era when, sadly, a queer Latine creative being banished to a prison is not unheard of in the national news.
Read here the full online article.
