Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein On Modernizing the Romcom In Netflix’s <em>Office Romance</em>

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

The romantic comedy has spent the last decade being declared dead, then quietly resurrected, then declared dead again. Netflix's Office Romance isn't interested in that conversation. The film — starring Jennifer Lopez as Jackie Cruz, a pilot-turned-CEO who falls for her company's new in-house lawyer, Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein) — arrives less as a nostalgia play than as a genuine argument for what the genre can be when it grows up.

The film's origin story is almost offensively charming: according to Harper's Bazaar, Goldstein and his writing partner Joe Kelly sketched out the entire premise during a three-hour Manchester-to-London train ride in 2022, inspired by classics like Working Girl and Broadcast News — with Lopez as the only name ever attached to the lead. Goldstein, who co-wrote Ted Lasso and built a career on emotionally complicated men, wasn't interested in recycling Lopez's familiar rom-com positioning. "In Maid in Manhattan, in Wedding Planner, in Monster-in-Law, she's at a lower status," he explains. "What if she's the CEO now? She has a lot of power, and she's proud of what she's built." The script flips the genre's gendered power dynamic without making it the punchline — Jackie's authority is never questioned, never played for irony. The comedy comes from the relationship itself, not from the novelty of a woman running the room.

The Boss, the Bubble, and the Baggage

Lopez says she connected immediately to Jackie's split between public armor and private self. "Jackie's very misunderstood in this story, and I understood being misunderstood," she says — a pointed observation from one of the most relentlessly scrutinized entertainers alive. The film's emotional engine runs on that tension: Daniel sees through Jackie's professional fortress almost immediately, which is both the attraction and the complication. The writing has Goldstein's signature texture — hard jokes, real cursing, unexpectedly wholesome core — and Lopez recognized it as something worth doing. Her bar for rom-coms is blunt: "Is it really romantic? Does the story work? Is it a new kind of take?" Office Romance cleared all three.

There's also a casting decision that lands like a full-circle moment: Edward James Olmos, who played Abraham Quintanilla in Selena — the 1997 film that launched Lopez to stardom and made her the first Latina actress to earn $1 million for a movie role — plays Jackie's father here. Lopez says there was never another option. Reuniting with Olmos prompted her to reflect on Selena's approaching 30th anniversary and its outsized influence on her own trajectory. "It wasn't until I was on a stadium stage filming that opening scene that I was like, 'I should be doing this,'" she says of how the role pulled her toward music entirely.

As for the rom-com's alleged irrelevance: Lopez isn't buying it. She traces the genre's recent retreat to a mid-2010s cultural appetite for shock and prestige darkness, but she's not worried. "No generation is ever going to stop loving a great rom-com," she says, "because at the base of it is all of life." Goldstein, for his part, wants to make ten films with Lopez before they die. Given what they pulled off on a train between cities, that timeline feels almost conservative.

The best rom-coms don't ask you to suspend disbelief — they remind you why you believed in the first place.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.