photographY NINO MUÑOZ
Jennifer Garner is in a new era. As she returns to our screens for the second season of the thriller The Last Thing He Told Me, the star explains to Emily Cronin how the past decade has shaped her, why she’s feeling stronger than ever and what’s in store for the future
You won’t be surprised to learn that Jennifer Garner is a morning person. By the time we connect via video call at 9am, the actor has already completed a dance-cardio workout, caught up on email and meeting notes for ongoing projects, sent her kids to school and taken a good, long look at the lemon trees fruiting outside the window of her Los Angeles home office.
“Oh, gosh – I’ve been up [for] so many hours already. I love early mornings,” she says, delivering a classic Jennifer Garner smile. You know the one: that big, open beam we’ve come to know from Alias and Suddenly 30 and Juno and Yes Day (and maybe even Valentine’s Day, too). Garner, 53, isn’t just famous. During a career spanning three decades so far, fans
and the general public have come to feel they know her. When she’s pictured running errands in jeans and a jumper – even if it’s Celine, like the cardigan she’s wearing today – we think she’s the kind of mum we wouldn’t mind chatting with at the school gates. When she glams up for a red carpet or a marie claire photo shoot, we’re mesmerised. When she’s going through heartbreak, we’re on her side.
What we sense in her smile is a lack of artifice, which is really something when you consider that her abiding memory of “a pretty idyllic childhood” in Charleston, West Virginia, is yearning for the chance to pretend to be someone else. “I don’t ever remember not wanting to perform. I was always sniffing it out,” she says. At university, she dropped her Southern accent (some words, such as “lawyer”, are still tells, though) and acted in summer Shakespeare festivals. Then she moved to New York and found early success with theatre auditions. Still, “I was so broke that I walked back and forth to the theatre because I couldn’t afford the subway,” she recalls.
Talent: Jennifer Garner
Editor: Georgie McCourt
Stylist: Marc Eram
Photographer: Nino Muñoz
Hair: Eduardo Mendez
Makeup: Kara Yoshimoto Bua
Producer: One Ten Media
Wearing: Zimmermann
Her latest project, then, is a return to form. In The Last Thing He Told Me on Apple TV+, Garner plays Hannah Hall, a woodturner whose husband’s disappearance sparks a quest for answers that draws her closer to her spiky stepdaughter (2024 Mean Girls star and Australian actor Angourie Rice). The second season reveals a tougher, more physical Hannah. When she reaches for a fire axe in a chase scene, you believe she’s willing to use it on one of her pursuers (or at least their tyres).
“I love that element: that she actually has to grapple and fight for her life a couple times,” she says. “I do think Hannah would have learnt how to do that as part of preparing for any event or emergency. This is a woman who has stayed up at night for many, many nights, scared out of her mind, creating a plan.”
It’s satisfying to see Garner kicking arse again. Also fun? Spotting longtime friends Victor Garber (they met on Alias and he officiated her 2005 wedding to now-ex-husband Ben Affleck) and Judy Greer (the grown-up “Tom-Tom” from Suddenly 30) pop up in scenes. Does she realise that the latter movie is still responsible for a lot of women’s ambitions to work in magazines?
“Really?” she replies. “That’s kind of like at the CIA. They had something for a while called the ‘Sydney effect’. They asked me to come and speak and said: ‘Everyone who’s here because of Alias, stand up’ and all of these incredible women stood. I hold that so dear. That’s incredible to get to influence someone like that.”
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Jennifer Garner wears Gabriela Hearst top, $7300; Bohème by Véro earrings, $249, and ring, $95.
Elisabetta Franchi jacket, and skirt, both POA; Black Suede Studio shoes, $562.
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“I was so broke that I walked back and forth to the theatre because I couldn’t afford the subway”
Ask Garner what she’s most proud of in work or life, and her answer is immediate: “My children.” She took a step back from acting when her children with Affleck were young. “It never felt like a sacrifice. It was really hard to go to work and it definitely shaped the jobs I chose in a big way.”
Today her three kids range in age from 13 to 20 years old. The most surprising thing about raising teens is that “they’re just so cool!” “Parenting now has shifted,” she adds. “It’s more about parenting with a button on my mouth ... You have to let them grow up and make their choices. You don’t get to control it.” She’s “so proud of how they walk through the world, and proud of them for trying hard”.
If her kids are the source of her greatest pride, navigating public interest in them and in her own private life has been “the hardest thing. Not hard in the grand scheme of what is hard in the world, but tricky for me and tricky for my family,” she explains.
Garner and close friend Reese Witherspoon (an executive producer of The Last Thing, alongside Garner) have both lobbied for stronger privacy laws on behalf of children of celebrities. Garner protects her peace by refusing to engage with tabloid coverage. “It doesn’t serve me to take in gossip about myself or anyone else, much less my kids, so I don’t do it.”
Her big break came in 1998, with a small but riveting role in Felicity. That was enough for show creator JJ Abrams (dad to singer-songwriter Gracie) to cast her as the lead in spy action thriller Alias two years later.
The series was a sensation, launching Garner as unstoppable spy
Sydney Bristow and Bradley Cooper as friend and journalist Will Tippin. Everyone watched. (When I learnt that I’d be interviewing Garner, the first thing I did was text the friend I bonded with during our weekly Alias viewing parties at university. Until a few years ago, she had me stored in her phone as “Alias Emily”.) I ask Garner why she thinks Alias resonated so strongly and she deflects to credit co-stars and collaborators. “I think it was the beginning of a lot of people’s careers that have nothing to do with me,” she says. “All I know is that it was an insane time. I’d work overnight every Friday. Then on Saturdays, I’d get up, work out and the doorbell would ring: here’s your Russian tutor, here’s your French tutor, here’s the fight team coming to teach you this week’s fights … It was really, really intense but it worked out.”
In the middle of Alias’ five-season run, she made Suddenly 30 (the US title was 13 Going on 30), in which she was bubbly and believable as a teen transposed into a 30-year-old fashion magazine editor’s body.
Then came a run of roles, startling in their variety, from action to romance to indie and beyond (fun fact: she even appeared in the video
for The Pussycat Dolls’ “I Hate This Part”). “The common thread is that each of those roles matters and is important. I’m always looking to flip what I’ve just done; that’s the fun of being an actor,” she says. “Although … I really do like when there’s a bit of action.”
Leaning on her community shored her up then and continues to now. “I make a big, concerted effort to see my people as much as I can because that’s what matters ... That’s where your resilience is: it’s in your relationships and in the people who carry you through.”
So does daily journalling and, physically, her routine is different today than it was even six months ago. “I realised that I had pursued strength and stamina at the expense of mobility, so I’m incorporating things I haven’t done in so long, like yoga,” she says. “I have to back up to go forward.” Garner is in a two-a-day workout routine right now in preparation for an upcoming production. Today began with The Limit with Beth Nicely and will end with Gyrotonics – “my favourite” – which is a movement method that combines elements of yoga, dance, gymnastics and tai chi. And, of course, she has her beloved fight scenes to act as another form of physical therapy.
Acting increasingly looks like one of many important things in Garner’s life rather than the thing. Along with her kids, high on her priority list is her early childhood education advocacy with Save the Children US, as well as her work as co-founder of Once Upon a Farm. She joined the organic children’s food company in 2017 and has embraced her mission to upgrade the nutritional value of convenience foods for children and families. “The food industry was feeding little kids a bunch of garbage,” she says, as I notice a framed sign on the wall behind her desk reading, “The Office of Farmer Jen”. “It doesn’t have to be that way. We can do better by kids.” O’Farm, as she calls it, is personal. The company uses produce from Garner’s century-old family farm in Oklahoma in some of its products. She’s particularly proud that O’Farm is available on US food benefits programs WIC and SNAP. The brand has a strong presence in Garner’s kitchen, too. Her favourite things to reach for are “the Apple, Cherry & Elderberry Immunity Blend. And the Oat Milk Smoothies, so creamy and delicious. And we love all the bars and the Tractor Wheels.” The company is planning to go public this year.
JEN
“The CIA asked me to come and speak and said: ‘Everyone who’s here because of Alias, stand up’ and all of these incredible women stood”
I make a big, concerted effort to see my people as much as I can, because that’s what matters ... That’s where your resilience is: it’s in your relationships
Garner isn’t very online, so it’s hard to tell if she’s aware that she has a reputation as the most likeable woman in Hollywood. Online gossip sites (not known for being the nicest) call for her and Affleck to get the Oscar for best co-parenting, and celebrate her rumoured relationship with tech CEO John Miller (all she’ll say is “I have so much love in my life”). People leave affirming comments on her Pretend Cooking Show reels and monthly recaps on Instagram (“Our country needs more Jennifer Garner!”). You get the sense that the whole internet is rooting for her happiness.
Does that surprise her? “So much about my life surprises me,” she says, and pauses. “That I’m still working, that I’m still alive, that my kids are healthy, that my work relationships – which are more like familial friendships – are still the same as they were 25 or 30 years ago, but richer and deeper and stronger. It’s all a gift. I just feel so grateful to my job for giving me these people. And then, yeah, that I’m able to co-parent at this point in time with peace and equanimity and a partnership that I didn’t know [if] I would ever get back to.
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Michael Kors dress, gloves and boots, all POA; Christina Caruso earrings, $426.
Zimmermann dress, $2750; Lady Grey earrings, $276; Christina Caruso bangle, $527, and cuff, $195.