Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have said very little in public about their 2024 divorce. But in a new sit-down interview with CBS Sunday Morning‘s Lee Cowan over the weekend to promote her starring role in the upcoming remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Lopez opened up about how her fairy tale second chance and then subsequent second split with Affleck was actually a good thing.

In fact, Lopez told Cowan that her divorce from Affleck was “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Lopez praised Affleck’s independent, artist-led studio, Artist Equity, for helping to finance the musical drama that is slated to open on Oct. 10, describing how, “I told him [Affleck] that this was the role I was born to play and I wanted to do it and he was like, ‘Okay,’ and he helped make it happen.” The Accountant 2 actor is one of the executive producers on the project that is the second big screen adaptation of Argentine author Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel about the intimate conversations between two Argentine prisoners.

Lopez called the filming of the movie a “refuge” from thinking about the chaos of her personal life at the time. “It was like the best and the worst of times in a way because it was every moment on set and every moment I was doing this role… I was so happy and then it was, like, back home it was not great and it was just like, ‘How do I reconcile this?,’” she said.

She then added, seemingly of the couple’s divorce, “it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it changed me… it didn’t change me… it helped me grow in a way that I needed to grow. Become more self-aware. I’m a different person now than I was last year I think.”

Lopez and Affleck first dated in 2022 and got engaged before breaking up and then reconnecting in 2021, getting married the following year and divorcing last year. Speaking about the divorce in March of this year, Affleck told GQ that Lopez was “somebody I have a lot of respect for,” noting that, “I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life. But I really hope that whatever you use doesn’t suggest that I have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that.”

At the time, he promised the magazine that there was “no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue” about the couple’s split. “It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do.”