Gloria Estefan is happy she didn’t end up performing alongside Jennifer Lopez and Shakira for the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, especially after watching Lopez air her frustration about having to share the stage with so little time to perform. Estefan, who has performed at the famed sporting event on more than one occasion, revealed that she turned down the performance during a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. The Cuban singer told the Bravo honcho “Look, this is the bottom line. You have very little time, like 12 minutes or something, to get things on and off the set,” Estefan, 64, explained. “So, could you do it with one person? Yes, but I think they wanted to throw a Miami and Latin extravaganza and they tried to pack it as much as possible…OK, and imagine what J.Lo would have said if I was the third [performer]! I literally would come out, done ‘Shake Your Body’ [‘Conga’] and out. It was their moment. Plus, I didn’t want to go on a diet in December.”
Estefan was reacting to the comments Lopez, 52, made in her new documentary Halftime, which chronicles the road to her big Super Bowl performance. The film opened at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month. Lopez argued that the NFL should have picked just one of them to headline the show inside Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. “This is the worst idea in the world to have two people do the Super Bowl,” she said, noting she had to cut her performance short in order to accommodate “Hips Don’t Lie” singer Shakira, 45. “This is something I have been working for and hoping for for years.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Lopez’s manager, Benny Medina, shared similar feelings. He added: “It was an insult to think that you needed two Latinas to do the job that one artist historically has done.”
Regardless, Estefan was proud of both women, even adding in more jokes about how the performance would have been bad timing for her. “Look, it’s their moment,” Estefan added. “They’re in a whole other thing. I’ve done a couple of Super Bowls and I didn’t want to go on a diet in December. It was Christmas!”
Viewers also enjoyed it. Per Variety, the halftime show set drew 103 million total viewers on Fox, a 4& increase – or roughly 3 million more viewers – than the previous year with Maroon 5.
