The movie Jennifer Garner was right to be worried about: “Yes, I’m scared to death”
Some actors, once they find their niche, like to stick to it. Obviously, there are the action guys like Statham and Stallone, and then there are the comedy specialists like Will Ferrell. But if it’s body swap movies you want, then there’s really one go-to, and that is Jennifer Garner.
That’s because she’s starred in not one, not two, but three of the ‘go to bed as one person, wake up as another’ films, including one that’s perfect for this time of year with Ed Helms from The Office US, called Family Switch.
One of those Netflix efforts that you stumble upon while bored trying to find something to watch that isn’t Stranger Things for the fifteenth time, it’s the 2023 seasonal story of a family who experience some kind of strange planetary event (you can almost hear the writers saying “that’ll do”) and end up inhabiting each other’s bodies, including a dog, and honestly that’s about all you need to know.
But because it’s based around the spirit of Christmas, it keeps popping up once the mince pies are out. Garner no doubt picked up a reasonable cheque for doing it, especially given she has that history with body swaps, having had her biggest hit back in 2004 with 13 Going on 30, in which she, yep, you’ve guessed it, made some kind of generic wish to be someone else, and that’s exactly what happened.
As if that weren’t enough, she also signed on for Nine Lives, which is not the harrowing film about gay sex and drug addiction from the same year, or the Paris Hilton slasher horror from 2002, but actually a 2016 movie about workaholic Kevin Spacey who gets his mind trapped inside the family cat, Mr Fuzzypants, which actually sounds harder to endure than the first two.
So yeah, if it’s a ‘hilarious’ ‘how did they end up like that’ comedy you’re after, Garner is a fair shout to start off with. Of course, they’re not all she’s done, aside from switcheroos, she gained a solid amount of fame for starring in JJ Abrams’ sci-fi series Alias back in the early 2000s, which was a massive hit and earned her Golden Globes, among other awards, across a five-season run.
She made the jump to mainstream movies in 2003 when she appeared as Elektra in the Ben Affleck Marvel Comics movie Daredevil, which didn’t cause too much of a stir with critics but turned out to be a big success in an era before superhero movies were all the rage, as the MCU began to take hold some years later.
Garner’s butt-kicking female character was a highlight of the movie, something that the plot of the film actively worked against, given that she wound up dead in it. But it strangely played out well for Garner, who ended up getting her own spin-off movie, Elektra, two years later.
As Garner told Deseret News just after the release: “When ‘Elektra’ died in the Daredevil series, the readers were really upset. Which is why Frank Miller created this comic book: to give her her own story line. I’m not that worried about the box office. But I want the fans to like it. I want it to be the Elektra they know in the books. So, yes, I’m scared to death.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work. When Elektra was released, it ended up losing quite a bit of money once all the costs were figured out against a box office return of about $57m. Garner’s performance in the title role did find some fans, however, and almost twenty years later, she was back as the character for 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.
