Garner: Career a ‘big accident’
Twenty years ago, Jennifer Garner thought her career couldn’t get better. She’d survived nine months of sleeping in a kitchen in Manhattan and eating spaghetti with butter while understudying for an Ivan Turgenev play on Broadway, scored a few walk-on parts on TV, and landed the lead in a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in which she played a 19th-century orphan.
“Making a couple hundred dollars a week to pay for my apartment, I really thought that was as good as it was going to get,” Garner says on an afternoon in Los Angeles. “I was completely and totally thrilled with that.”
Her Hallmark director, Christopher Cain, invited her to fly out to Malibu, Calif., and stay with him and his wife, Sharon. The rental car company ran out of cheap sedans, so it handed her the keys to a convertible. One day, she drove around, got lost and found herself on Hollywood Boulevard stumbling over other tourists and signs as she watched the stars go by under her feet. On Aug. 20, she got her own.
“It’s all been a big accident,” she insists. Not for anyone who’s paid close attention to her performances. Her first starring film role, 2004’s “13 Going on 30,” is this generation’s “Big.”
“There’s rarely a day that I’m out in the world that somebody doesn’t mention ‘13 Going on 30,’ ” Garner says.
Only Jennifer Garner would highlight the body-swapped eighthgrader’s enthusiasm, not her ignorance. Only Jennifer Garner could take the anxious adoptive mother role in “Juno” and fill her brittle character with so much heart that she, not the sarcastic teen, becomes the film’s emotional center. And only Jennifer Garner could launch into a major new act of her career — “The Tribes of Palos Verdes,” “Love, Simon” and this fall’s HBO black comedy “Camping,” her first TV show since “Alias” — with such modesty that she hardly seems to expect that people will catch on that at 46, she’s doing the most fulfilling work of her career.
In 2001, “Alias” made her a star. The role was perfect: Secret agent Sydney Bristow was smart and tough, yet relatable — not a flat killer femmebot but the girl next door, magnified. Even better, every episode let Garner prove her versatility. She disguised herself as maids, goths and geishas, and pestered the makeup team to give her a real challenge — a fat janitor, maybe? — but the show kept her stubbornly sexy. Fittingly, critics compared this stunning breakout chameleon to other celebrities. Garner was “Jackie Chan in a slinky cocktail dress.” “Hollywood’s version of Mother Teresa — only hotter.” And they delighted that each episode kept her “cuffed and bound more often than Bettie Page.” Garner sheepishly referred to the T&A close-ups as “biscuit shots.”
“Playing Sydney Bristow defined me for so long, and it redefined me to myself. It made me strong and made me more confident,” Garner says. “It even changed the tenor of my voice.”
One month later, she won the Golden Globe for dramatic actress in a TV series, beating out both Lorraine Bracco and Edie Falco of “The Sopranos.”
“13 Going on 30” confirmed that Garner was a movie star too. The next year, she married and soon after gave birth to her first daughter. Having kids forced her to focus. She could no longer wave off her career as an accident. After each baby, acting had to be a choice.
“I would have to decide, ‘No I actually do love this job,’ ” admits Garner.
Yes, she plays a lot of moms. To her, they’re individual women. Dismissing them as just moms is dismissive of moms — and of women. “That’s crazy!” she groans. “I love playing a mom because there are no higher stakes then something involving your kids. Nothing will push you further.”
Next month, the thriller “Peppermint,” directed by “Taken” filmmaker Pierre Morel, lets Garner play a mom who would make Sidney Bristow proud. After her daughter is murdered in a drive-by shooting, she takes vengeance on a gang.
Says Garner: “I don’t like to give up my action scenes to my beloved double, Shauna (Duggins), to do for me because I want to do them — they’re scenes! It might hurt, and it takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it because it’s so emotion-filled to get to this other place where you have no choice but to fight.” She’ll also appear in the ensemble comedy “A Happening of Monumental Proportions” from director — and “13 Going on 30” co-star — Judy Greer.
“Playing Sydney Bristow ... made me strong and made me more confident.” — JENNIFER GARNER