Jennifer Lopez: Latin Hustle

According to Eric Stoltz, her costar in the upcoming Amazon adventure Anaconda, Jennifer Lopez has a unique way of expressing her satisfaction with a take: she dances.

Of course, you'd dance too if your career was going as well as Lopez's.

A few short years ago, the Bronx-born beauty was shaking her groove thing on TV's "In Living Color." Today, after turning in supporting performances in My Family and Money Train, she finds herself with a quartet of plum film roles. In Francis Ford Coppola's Jack, she played Robin Williams's fifth-grade teacher.

"In between scenes he'd want to play, so we'd do things like Romeo and Juliet as performed by Sylvester Stallone and Rosie Perez," she says of her irrepressible costar. Lopez takes a walk on the wild side as a Cuban nanny torn between Jack Nicholson and Stephen Dorff in Bob Rafelson's upcoming heist film, Blood and Wine.

"I'm so afraid to see what this movie's going to look like because I was showing a lot of flesh," she frets.

In Anaconda, Lopez will appear as a documentary filmmaker who battles a 40-foot snake. And in director Gregory Nava's upcoming film version of the life of slain Tejano singer Selena, Lopez will finally get to show off her dance moves on the big screen.

"You know what the great thing about Selena was?" she offers. "As a Latin woman in the United States, you're taught that you should be skinnier, that you shouldn't have such a big butt. You feel self-conscious. I did. I was really thin but I had a booty on me that you would not believe, like two potatoes on sticks. But Selena went out there and wore tight things and showed her butt and all of a sudden, young girls were like, 'You know what? I'm beautiful.' She embraced the fact that she was Latin and showed the world that there is beauty in diversity."