Jennifer Garner’s “hardest job” and the irreparable damage it did to her career
Jennifer Garner may have established herself as an action star with television’s Alias, but that doesn’t mean that everything afterwards was a cakewalk.
The pipeline for actors that originate on television to be just as successful on the big screen may have gotten easier within recent years, but that wasn’t always the case when the two mediums were more stratified.
Even stars who’ve had a significant role in a major success on television may have struggled to even find interesting roles once they decided to start making films, with George Clooney perhaps the best exception to the rule, because it was after his acclaimed turn on ER that he became one of the biggest actors in Hollywood.
In this, Jennifer Garner’s career arc was slightly different, as although she had a few small film roles early on in her career in Deconstructing Harry and Catch Me if You Can, had breakthrough came with Alias, the action-packed espionage series produced by JJ Abrams. The show was so popular as a preview of her star potential that it only felt inevitable that she would end up being cast in a major blockbuster franchise, but unfortunately, in the follow-up, she had a string of bad luck in choosing which role she wanted to attach herself to.
In the era where comic book adaptations were getting increasingly popular after the success of Blade in 1998, X-Men in 2000, and Spider-Man in 2002, it only made sense that Garner would want to play a superhero, even if she had some trepidation about being cast as Elektra in Daredevil, which starred her future husband Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock.
While not quite the disaster that some critics made it out to be, Daredevil didn’t deliver on expectations and didn’t have the makings of the next major Marvel franchise, but neither Affleck nor Garner was truly at fault for their performances, as both contributed their best in trying to ensure that the fight choreography looked as realistic as possible. In fact, the latter even admitted that the training she underwent to play the character was some of the most challenging of her entire career.
“It has occurred to me recently, though, that Elektra was hard,” she said, “It was a really intense job. It was the hardest job I have ever had. It made Alias look like a catwalk, which I didn’t think was possible”.
The film could have been a single flop that both its stars moved on from, but Garner was contracted to reprise her role, so instead of making a straightforward sequel, 20th Century Fox decided to develop a spinoff, simply titled Elektra, in which she would reprise the titular part.
Daredevil was a flawed film, and one that is slightly better for those who sought out the extended R-rated cut, which cut out some of the goofier elements, but Elektra was a complete disaster, ranked alongside Batman & Robin, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, and Howard the Duck as being one of the worst superhero films ever made. It was an unlucky impediment to Garner’s career that suggested she wasn’t a viable star, with the only redemption being that she was offered the opportunity to return for the character for a self-aware cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, a film that served as a farewell to the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel productions.
