Jennifer Lopez Compares Her Toronto Festival Debut of “Hustlers” to “Unstoppable”: 'A Good Luck Room' (Exclusive)

Jennifer Lopez is following up the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival premiere of ‘Hustlers’ with “a very different kind of movie,” she tells PEOPLE

Jennifer Lopez’s new movie has the Toronto International Film Festival buzzing with excitement, creating a "moving" experience for the actress and producer.

Lopez, 55, tells PEOPLE exclusively that the reception following the starry Sept. 6 premiere of sports biopic Unstoppable has been “really great.”

In fact, “I feel like that room has a good luck room for me now,” she says of the festival's famed Roy Thomson Hall screening venue. “Because I remember sitting there watching Hustlers in those seats… and thinking, ‘Wow, this movie works.’”

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Lopez starred in Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, which premiered in Toronto in 2019, as stripper-turned-scammer Ramona Vega — “a little bit different vibe” from Unstoppable, she quips.

“Those types of movies, you never know, it could go either way,” she says. “So to be back here with this movie and it's a very different kind of movie, it was a really good feeling.”

Unstoppable tells the story of real-life wrestler Anthony Robles, who was born with one leg and won an NCAA national championship in 2011 while at Arizona State University. Jharrel Jerome plays Anthony while Lopez plays his mother Judy.

The page-to-screen adaptation of Robles and Austin Murphy’s book of the same name, which counts Ben Affleck and Matt Damon among its producers, costars Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña and Don Cheadle. William Goldenberg, who worked with Affleck as an editor on 2023’s Air and 2012’s Argo, makes his directorial debut with the film.

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The cast and real-life subjects were on hand at the TIFF premiere, and Lopez gave Judy a big hug onstage.

“When Judy and I first spoke, it was just about for me, learning as much as I could about how she really felt," Lopez tells PEOPLE, particularly when it came to the abusive dynamic between Judy and her partner Rich, played by Cannavale. 

“She was very open with me about it, and I was open with her about my own struggles and I was able to find commonality in that, because at the end of the day, you bring a lot of yourself to these characters,” adds Lopez. “And so it was a beautiful thing for me.”

Seeing the film with an audience Friday night, Lopez was struck watching "this story really take flight, I was very moved. I felt myself very emotional," she says, particularly by the universality of the Robles' inspirational story. "Everybody can relate to it."

Unstoppable, from Amazon MGM Studios, will be in limited theaters this December and streaming on Prime Video.

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