Jennifer Garner, who plays Elektra in the upcoming Daredevil movie, told
SCI FI Wire that a year's worth of Alias prepared her for the hard-fighting
role—but only up to a point. "I don't think I could have just
launched into this role with any confidence if it hadn't been for a year
of fighting constantly every two days," she said in an interview.
"But I did definitely have to bump it up a notch."
In particular, Garner had to train with twin sais, or Asian short swords—Elektra's
trademark weapons. Trainer Don Lee came to the Alias set during lunch
and also worked with Garner during her breaks. "He would come to
my house every Sunday for hours, and we would be in the backyard kind
of tearing things up," she said. "He taught me fights, so I
would learn how to fight with the sais. And my husband, Scott [Foley],
would kind of look out the back windows on Sunday and say, 'Oh god, that's
not good. This is not good.'"
In addition, Garner and star Ben Affleck had to learn wire work with
martial-arts choreographer Cheung Yan Yuen and his team. "Ben and
I trained for this one fight in the playground [three hours] every day
for six weeks nonstop," she said. "We would work [on the film]
all night, sleep ... from six to noon, meet each other around noon, [wire
train] for three hours, and then go straight downtown and work all night
again on a different fight."
The training and fighting eventually took their toll. "I took a
divot of skin out of [Affleck's] nose," Garner said. "He fought
with a stick, and he bashed all of my knuckles open, like just wide open.
... And then Colin Farrell [Bullseye] had to bite my lip in a fight and
got so into it he just started gnawing on me. So the next day and for
the next week I had a lip kind of out to here that was black." But
because of ratings concerns, the lip shot didn't make it into the final
cut of the movie, which opens Feb. 14, she added.
