The one kind of movie Jennifer Garner has always wanted to make: “That’s a tricky genre”
If you ever find yourself without a new show to get stuck into, then you could do a lot worse than going back to the start of this century, when, even before he conquered the world with island-based mystery Lost, JJ Abrams created a show called Alias with Jennifer Garner.
An action thriller, it first broadcast just a couple of weeks after 9/11 and starred Garner as a CIA spy called Sydney Bristow trying to hide her profession from her friends and family while taking down a sophisticated criminal organisation.
Running for five seasons, it picked up multiple awards and served as an early example of Abrams’ astonishing creativity in the years before he would go on to helm the Star Wars reboot, but it also showcased Garner, who excelled in the lead role.
She picked up a Golden Globe award for Best Actor for the show in addition to a host of Emmy nominations and was so convincing that the actual CIA enlisted her to star in their own recruitment videos, stating: “Jennifer and the character of Sydney Bristow both reflect a lot of the qualities we look for in new career field officers.”
Garner went straight on from that show’s success to a film called 13 Going on 30, a romantic comedy with Mark Ruffalo about Jenna Rink, a 1980s teenager who wakes up to find she’s suddenly a grown-up fashion editor in New York (standard). The critical reception wasn’t anything to write home about, but Garner’s performance definitely stood out, and the film was a big box office success, tripling its budget and becoming a home video hit with lots of women sitting drinking wine with their friends under a duvet.
This year sees a musical adaptation of the movie with Garner as an executive producer, starting in Manchester on September 21st. Garner said: “After more than 20 years—I still get to talk about Jenna Rink and 13 Going on 30 more days than not — who knew our quirky little movie would have such staying power?”
It seems like the production marks the culmination of something of a dream achieved for Garner, who, as far back as 2012, had been angling to move into the genre. Asked what kind of stories she’d most like to tell, Garner responded: “I’d like to do a musical. A movie musical, preferably. That’s a tricky genre, isn’t it? When they work, they’re kind of magical. Every time one works, I cheer.”
After the comedy, Garner picked up roles in films like Dallas Buyers Club and found acclaim as Elektra in several superhero movies, including Daredevil alongside Ben Affleck, her own film Elektra in 2005 and then in last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
This year, she was seen with Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the Apple TV+ show The Last Thing He Told Me, about a woman whose husband disappears, leaving her a cryptic note to follow. She’s also likely to star in a space drama about a hostage negotiator sent 250 miles away from Earth called Zygote, plus a new festive movie called Mrs Claus, in which presumably she will play a character called Mary Christmas. Mary. Like Merry. Never mind.
