She knows kung fu, runs like the wind and her muscles put Ben Affleck,
her co-star in 'Daredevil', to shame. Stephen Saban meets Jennifer Garner,
possibly the most powerful woman in Hollywood
Jennifer Garner accidentally tore a hole in the neck of her jumper this
morning. It seems a trapezius muscle needed some extra room. 'My trainer
has been working my back and I've gotten broader and I'm busting out of
my clothes like the Incredible Hulk! It's a ridiculous story,' she says,
'but it's true.'
Garner and I are in the grand Rotunda restaurant on the Walt Disney Studios
lot in Burbank, California, where Alias, the television show of which
Garner is the star, is filmed. The restaurant is at the end of Mickey
Avenue, just past Dopey Drive, on the top floor of a building whose roof
is supported by enormous statues of all seven of the Seven Dwarfs. One
feels very small walking through the entrance - dwarfed, you might say.
The actress and I are having lunch under the restaurant's high-domed
ceiling, surrounded by suited executives and obsequious staff, all of
whom greet my companion like an old friend ('Jennifer! The usual?'). Garner
is on call. We don't have much time.
Garner is unquestionably beautiful, and she takes the compliment well.
Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she's wearing black jeans and
a tight red T-shirt with no visible tears. The T-shirt belongs to her,
she says, but the jeans are Agent Sydney Bristow's. Sydney is the character
she plays on Alias - a sexy CIA double agent trained in espionage and
self-defence, who is a student by day and who does most of her undercover
work in wigs, high heels and hubba-hubba rubber dresses.
With its labyrinthine, double-crossing storylines, fraught family dramas
and gadget-laden action, in just two years Alias has replaced Buffy the
Vampire Slayer as the number-one guilty pleasure for discerning television
viewers everywhere. And at the centre of it all - saving the world, storming
the Vatican, scaling skyscrapers, kick-boxing henchmen, fighting back
tears - is Garner.
The relentless physical and emotional trauma she is forced to undergo
is exhausting to watch, but you wouldn't know it to look at her now. Garner,
whose favourite book as a child was Harriet the Spy, says it's been boring
in the studio today. 'We're just sitting around a table talking. Good
words, good scenes, but I'm not fighting, nothing's emotional, I'm not
kissing the boy.'
In fact, she's already kissed the boy. And how. In the special episode
that was shown immediately after this year's Super Bowl - one of American
television's most prestigious and highly rated slots - not only did Sydney
wear two separate revealing negligées (one red, one black), but
the dreaded Alliance was destroyed and Sydney and heartthrob Michael Vartan's
Agent Vaughn (her CIA handler - are you keeping up?) finally kissed. Whew.
'Did you think it was a good kiss?' Garner asks, as if she doesn't know
the answer. 'We've been waiting two years. Some people say you can't consummate
a relationship because then nobody wants to watch the show any more. But
we trusted our fans more than that.' She sips a spoonful of her white-bean
soup with chicken.
'We couldn't continue playing these characters honestly and as adults
and keep sharing these longing looks. I mean, they're 30-year-olds who
are attracted to each other, so let's get on with it!'
Garner, who is 30, does most of Sydney's high-flying, chop-socky gymnastics
herself. But she admits there are limits. 'If it's a stunt that seems
totally not fun with no pay-off, like throwing myself on to the floor
again and again, I'll make my stunt double do that.
But all the fun stuff - being on a wire, being yanked, fighting - I do.'
And now she's about to fly on to the big screen as Elektra Natchios, the
hero's assassin-for-hire girlfriend and nemesis in Daredevil, the $100
million film based on the cult Marvel comic. This role finds her taking
on both Ben Affleck as Daredevil and Colin Farrell as Bullseye, in elaborate
fight scenes choreographed by the Hong Kong veteran Cheung-Yan Yuen, who
has done similar chores on The Matrix and Charlie's Angels.
But whereas Ben Affleck's crime-fighting persona has his build built
into his suit, Garner's body is the real thing - thanks to all that rigorous
training. 'Elektra's not a superhero,' Garner says. 'She's superhuman.
She's like a freaky ninja. When Daredevil came along,' she says, stabbing
at the leaves of her mesclun salad, 'people said I shouldn't do an action
movie, that I'm playing an action chick all year long.
'But I wanted to do it, I wanted to keep training, to be paid to train
with some of the best, and I wanted to spend the summer fighting. I've
loved this new incarnation of my career. Not that anyone ever knew me
the other way [when] I always played the vulnerable girl next door, who
was kind of smart but sad and wept a lot.'
Garner is referring to her somewhat wet, glasses-sporting role on the
now-cancelled drama series Felicity. 'Now I love the power that playing
a powerful woman brings you personally. And I've loved finding my own
physical power.'
Could she actually thwart an attacker? 'I pray that never happens,' she
says. 'I think I could take care of myself. But I'm so afraid to even
say that? because what if someone wants to try it out?' She smiles, then
breaks into a laugh. 'I can run pretty fast, though!'
Jennifer Garner was born in Houston, Texas, in April 1972, and her family
moved to Charleston, West Virginia, when she was three. 'There's not a
lot to it,' she says of the town she grew up in. Her younger sister Susannah
is now an accountant for the state of West Virginia, and her older sister
Melissa works in the marketing department of the Gillette Company. Her
parents, Bill, a recently retired chemical engineer at Union Carbide,
and Pat, an English teacher, are still very much together.
'My dad got his retirement boat a year ago,' says Garner, 'and now they're
sailing around the Bahamas.' At high school, Jennifer played saxophone
in the marching band and was water girl for the football team. Her all-consuming
passion was performing, which left her little time for dating and virtually
no interest in girly things like make-up and jewellery.
'There was a very dynamic woman who taught ballet in my home town,' she
says, 'a strict disciplinarian. And she was also, coincidentally, head
of the community theatre. Whatever she did, I followed. She was the Pied
Piper to me.' Garner took an exhaustive number of ballet classes, with
no real intention of becoming a proper ballerina.
'I couldn't get enough of it,' she says. 'The more classes I took, the
better I'd be when it was time to perform.' She discovered she liked to
sing (and had a decent voice) after taking lessons from another local
woman. Lead roles in musicals at the community theatre followed. Now,
she says, she's envious of the actresses in Moulin Rouge and Chicago -
even the ones in the chorus.
'Oh my God!' she says. 'I never have envy of other women working. I'm
always so happy for them. But I'm physically green that they got to do
those movies.'
After graduating from Denison University, Ohio with a bachelor of fine
arts degree in 1994, Garner understudied a play in New York, earning $150
a week. 'I would roll up pennies to take the subway to work in Times Square,'
she remembers. 'I was broke but happy.' In 1995 she landed a part in a
Danielle Steele made-for-TV movie. She was 22.
'I worked consistently and made a very good living at it for seven years
before anyone really knew who I was,' she says. 'Everything I did, it
would be like, "This is the thing that will launch you." I'd
call my mom and say, "Mom, guess what? I'm doing this thing and it's
gonna launch me!" But by the time Alias came along and people said
that, I didn't care any more. I was really happy just being a working
actor.'
That's funny, I tell her, because I recently read that Steven Spielberg
said that after casting her as a call-girl in Catch Me if You Can he thinks
she's going to be 'huge'.
'Steven's been so nice to me,' she says. 'The experience was so over
the top - getting that call, Steven offering me a tiny, one-scene role
in his movie. I mean, that's the sort of thing that I've been auditioning
for for, you know, eight years. And to actually have one pop into my lap
and have it be Steven Spielberg and have it be a scene that I love...'
As anyone who saw the film will remember, the scene in question calls
for Garner to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio.
Though she's kissed Ben Affleck, People magazine's 'Sexiest Man Alive,'
she's much happier kissing the sexiest man in her life, her husband Scott
Foley. 'I do kiss him all the time,' she confirms, smiling. She met the
handsome-and-then-some actor Foley, 30, in 1998 on the set of the television
series Felicity, where she had a recurring role as his girlfriend.
Foley has said that on the day he met Garner, he went home and told his
roommate that he'd met the girl he was going to marry. As you'd expect
from Garner's mate, Foley is such an uncommonly chivalrous young man that
even though their characters had already made whoopee on the show, he
didn't try to kiss her until their third date.
This shockingly loved-up couple married in October 2000, and now live
with their two dogs in a small house near the ocean in Pacific Palisades.
But between Garner's hectic 5am to 8pm Alias schedule and Foley's starring
role as a bungling attorney in the new sitcom AUSA, they rarely have time
together to enjoy the kitchen or the garden - both of keen interest to
Garner. Just as she begins describing a rare week they spent together
over Christmas, Garner is called to the set.
So off she goes, her biceps rippling under her T-shirt, her parting words
showing her up for the kick-boxing bad-ass she really is: 'It was the
act of taking care of my husband that I loved. I was taking care of him
for the first time in so long'. The world is safe in her hands.
