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ELLE Canada interviews Jennifer Garner
Jennifer Garner takes a break from blockbuster spy roles to explore the indie scene and tread the hallowed Broadway boards.
By Noreen Flanagan
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Jennifer Garner is used to suffering for her art -- literally. As double agent Sydney Bristow on Alias, she routinely scuffled with rogue spies and unsavoury criminals. Between TV seasons, the 35-year-old Golden Globe winner played a nimble ninja assassin in Daredevil and its spinoff, Elektra. While Garner had a physical reprieve in films like 13 Going on 30 and Catch and Release, she returned to the action-thriller genre in this fall's The Kingdom. She described the film's fight scenes as "down and dirty" and collapsed twice from heat stroke when temperatures on the Arizona set soared to 46°C.
For her next creative challenges, it's no wonder that Garner sought out gentler assignments. Following the lead of other A-listers who turn to indie fare (Toni Collette in Little Miss Sunshine) or Broadway (Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain), Garner signed on for a supporting role in the film Juno and a lead role in the play Cyrano de Bergerac, co-starring alongside Kevin Kline.
"It has always been my absolute dream to be on Broadway, and I've always loved independent films," explains Garner. "They can stay more true to character because they aren't trying to get the next big laugh, and the plot can be a little more meandering." Garner says that from the moment she read the script for
Juno -- a film that has been hyped as this year's Little Miss Sunshine -- it was a "no-brainer."
This quirky comedy revolves around Juno, a precocious teenaged girl (played by Canadian actress Ellen Page) who ends up pregnant after her first sexual tryst with her Tic Tac-addicted boyfriend, Bleeker (fellow Canuck Michael Cera). It was directed by Jason Reitman of Thank You for Smoking indie fame, and the screenplay was penned by Diablo Cody, who wrote the popular autobiographical novel Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. "I read a lot of scripts and there are aspects of each of them that appeal to me, but this one had everything -- especially heart," explains Garner, who attended the film's screening at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. "It's about this family. You imagine that they are dysfunctional, but they are actually quite functional, loving and honest with one another." For Garner, the scene that most captures their enviable bond occurs when Juno tells her parents she is pregnant and going to give the baby up for adoption to a yuppie couple she found in the local PennySaver. (Garner plays the adoptive mom, and Jason Bateman plays her less-than-enthusiastic husband.) Juno's dad greets the news with a surprising sense of humour, noting that he didn't think the gangly, soft-spoken Bleeker "had it in him." Juno's good-natured stepmother admits that she would have preferred to hear that Juno was on drugs or expelled from school but rises to the occasion by offering to get prenatal vitamins for her.
"My parents were with me at the screening in Toronto, and the first thing my mother asked me afterwards was 'How do you think we would have responded if that had happened to one of you girls?'" says Garner. "And I said, 'Without a doubt, I know you would have been loving. The agony would have been for me, knowing that I had disappointed you.'"
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