Josh Duhamel on building trust with Jennifer Lopez for Shotgun Wedding: 'It could have been scary'

"You know, she's J. Lo."

"You know, she's J. Lo."

That's Josh Duhamel, trying to find the words to describe working alongside his Shotgun Wedding costar, multi-hyphenate Jennifer Lopez. "It could have been scary," he admits to EW, adding, "Thankfully, I knew her. I didn't know what it was going to be like working with her on a set, but I knew her well enough to know that it would be easy to connect with her on the levels that we needed to in order for this movie to work."

In the action-comedy, helmed by Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore, Lopez and Duhamel star as a couple whose tropical destination wedding is thrown off track when the entire wedding party is taken hostage. Shotgun Wedding is crammed with truly wild and ludicrous moments — zipline rides with hand grenades, homemade hairspray flamethrowers, parasailing gun fights — most of which involve its two leads.

From the beginning, Duhamel says he and Lopez knew they had to connect as a pair before anything else could work. "That was one of the first things we talked about on a Zoom call," he recalls. "She was in Miami and I was in L.A., and I just said, 'If we can really make it believable that we are in love and a real couple, the audience will buy it, and therefore they'll buy all the high jinks that happen from there.'"

Ultimately, says Duhamel, Lopez was "so easy to work with" and "an absolute pro" and the two were able to build the necessary trust involved in pulling off some of the film's more outlandish moments. "I think when you're doing something sort of broad like this, you have to be able to try things that are too far in order to pull it back," he says. "And if you're afraid to make mistakes and be silly and look stupid, you can't find the right tone in a scene. She trusted me and I trusted her. And that was a big part of the process."

Shotgun Wedding
Ana Carballosa/Lionsgate

Of course, J. Lo wasn't the only famous Jennifer that Duhamel had to share screen time with. Jennifer Coolidge, fresh off her award-winning run as Tanya McQuoid on The White Lotus, plays his character's mother. Addressing the elephant in the room, Duhamel points out the mathematical impossibility of the casting: "First of all, she's, like, not even nine years older than me, so it's just not fair to her." But, selfishly, he says, "I was thrilled, are you kidding me? I love her."

The actor, who says he's been a fan of Coolidge's ever since her breakout role as one of Jerry's flings on Seinfeld in 1993, admits that actually working with Coolidge is an experience he'll not soon forget. He likens it to what he imagines it would have been like to be on set with Andy Kaufman. "Because you never knew if he was performing or if he was just f—ing with people, and that's kind of what she does," he says with a laugh.

Duhamel adds that there's a "very meta" quality to Coolidge's work due to the fact that you never know if she's doing a bit or not. "She'll do things that make everybody look at each other and go, 'Wait, did she mean to do that?'" he explains. "So that's what I'll always remember about working with Jennifer — this amazing ability to keep everybody kind of leaning in, going, 'Oh, my God, that's the magic.'"

Cheech Marin as Robert Rivera and Lenny Kravitz as Sean Hawkins in Shotgun Wedding. Photo Credit: Ana Carballosa
Jennifer Coolidge in 'Shotgun Wedding'. Ana Carballosa

Coolidge's magic aside, Duhamel does reveal he had some nerves heading into the project. As a Transformers series alum, he's no stranger to action sequences. But Shotgun Wedding, which also stars Cheech Marin, Lenny Kravitz, D'Arcy Carden, and Callie Hernandez, is no normal action film, nor is it a straight comedy or a romance, although it's not not those things.

It wasn't the zipline grenades or the parasailing gun fights that made him nervous. He admits he found himself wondering, "Like, is this gonna work? It just felt so big and broad. But that's kind of the intention behind it all." Duhamel, a self-professed lover of "big goofy stuff," credits director Moore with committing to the insanity of it all in order to make it come together.

Sometimes a little insanity is good for perspective. "I was sitting up [on the zipline] thinking, I'm harnessed to this thing 20 feet in the air with J.Lo right now," Duhamel recalls. "And then she went down, and it was me on it again with Lenny Kravitz. I'm like, What the f— happened in my life? I never thought I was gonna be harnessed 20 feet in the air with Lenny Kravitz. That was something I didn't see coming."

Shotgun Wedding is now streaming on Prime Video.

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