Jennifer Garner Cover Interview: "I'm Not Good At Being Fake"

By Danielle Pergament

Photography by Tom Schirmacher

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Jennifer Garner's car is parked right over there, by the Prius, in the back of the lot. "It's kind of a long drive," she says, "so why don't we go together? We can talk on the way." Sounds good. I’ll drive with Garner, whom I’ve known for an hour and a half. Or 22 years, depending on how you’re counting.

We’ve just spent the early afternoon in a woodworking studio in downtown Los Angeles. That's what I call it, but I’ve been corrected. Technically, it's "wood turning." Garner spent dozens of hours here, a ground-floor industrial space the size of a yoga studio with the decibel range of a speed-metal show, learning the craft from a master woodturner named Aaron as she prepared for her latest role as an artist in the Apple TV+ thriller The Last Thing He Told Me.

Full look Miu Miu. Tiffany jewelry. Makeup colors: Ethereal Eyes Eyeshadow Palette by Makeup By Mario and Pillow Talk Matte Revolution Lipstick and Lip Cheat Pencil by Charlotte Tilbury.

"It spoke to the mountain girl in me — it's a big part of Appalachian culture," says Garner, 51, who grew up in West Virginia. She's also really good at it. "First, we just did spindles, then we made rolling pins before we graduated to bowls." Looks like she graduated with honors — the bowl she made that afternoon (and then gifted to me) is beautiful. After the woodworking — wood turning — is done, she sweeps the floor, vacuums up the sawdust, and brushes the chips off her cashmere sweater. It's time for lunch.

From the outside, Garner's car is a sleek, polished black BMW and, probably by design, not entirely welcoming — are the windows tinted? She chirps the locks open, we get in, and she pulls out of the parking lot guiding us toward lunch. A few pedestrians at the crosswalk do a double take, squinting into the windshield. Is that…? But in motion, Garner's car is anonymous, a German luxury four-door that merges into the river of German luxury four-doors that is the Los Angeles freeway system.

The inside of the car tells a different story. There's loose change tossed on the console, an open pack of gum, in one of the side pockets is a bag of Pirate's Booty — one of those small, not-for-individual-sale bags that come in a larger package usually marked "family size."

Laquan Smith trench coat. Le Crayon Khol in Graphite by Chanel and Lipstick in 402 Vantine Fuchsia by Gucci.

I know this car. This is my car (not the BMW part). This is a car that is early for drop-off and queues up responsibly for 3 p.m. pickup. Where kids doze against the window with their hair still shower-wet, where they draw on the glass on cold mornings, where they change into their jerseys, text their friends, check Snapchat, lose homework. I’ll bet you that gum belongs to one kid, the processed white cheddar puffs to another, and the loose change is anyone's guess.

"Being a mother was one thing I knew I was going to be," Garner tells me as she changes lanes on the 101. "I really could have been a mother in any way. I could have adopted, I could have fostered, but there was no doubt I was going to be a mom. I mean, I was the kid with the doll everywhere I went. And I had a babysitting company with my friend Carrie — C & J's Babysitting — from, like, seventh or eighth grade."

I tell Garner that our daughters actually go to school together. They’re four grades apart and I wouldn't say they know each other, but one day last year, after a particularly ugly mean-girl episode, my daughter was in line in the cafeteria trying not to cry in public. I wasn't there and the details were as vague as if they had been recounted by a seventh grader, but as she was standing in line, an older girl asked her if she was okay and somehow managed to replace a mean-girl episode with a moment of kindness and grace. She found out later that was Garner's eldest daughter.

"Oh, I love that," she says. "That's Violet."

Loewe dress.

Garner has three children with ex-husband Ben Affleck and she speaks as such a typical mom it's easy to forget that she's very much not a typical mom. Her kids don't love to watch her movies, she tells me. "They don't mind watching their dad, but they kind of want me to be their mom. They don't want to see me upset and women cry more in what we do. And they don't really want to see me in a romantic thing."

Garner talks about her kids with such warmth and wisdom it's hard not to ask her for advice. So I do. Maybe a few times.

"Your kids will really figure out who they are and what they are when they’re older, and most likely they will hew toward lovely," she says. "I have a lot of faith in my kids. I don't love every behavior all the time, always. It's gnarly growing up." After all, she points out, it's hard for everyone raising a kid in 2023. "We didn't have the eyes on us that our kids have. I was such a first-time mom. [My eldest daughter] didn't have a shot. She couldn't have a free thought — I was all over her. I was a nightmare for everyone around me."

If Jennifer Garner: Nightmare is tough to get your head around, you’re not wrong. Garner's brand is built on niceness as much as it is on being preternaturally fit. She's equal parts running shoes and something baking. Even calling it a brand seems cynical.

Garner became a proper celebrity in 2001 when she was 29 years old. She got married to arguably the most Us Weekly-able actor in Hollywood in 2005 when she was 33. She spent the next 13 years in the crosshairs of a kind of public attention that even the most seasoned celebrities could hardly withstand.

After getting divorced in 2018, she began what seemed like a long and tireless campaign toward… let's call it normalcy. Toward living and projecting the kind of familiar (and in her case, extremely beautiful and wealthy) motherhood that would be found at any school fundraiser. Somehow, through a war of attrition waged mostly with Instagram reels of layered chocolate and nut butter desserts, it became hard to think of her as anything but… nice.

"The problem with, ‘Oh, she's so nice’ is that when I have any kind of boundary, people think of it as much more than it actually is," says Garner. "The problem is being recognized on a day where I’m not so nice or when I have blackness in my soul. I’ve definitely had days where I just can't do it. I scowl at people before they can walk up to me. I’m not perfect, and I don't think I’m rude, but I’m not good at being fake. I’m an open book of a person."

Garner steers us off the freeway and into the labyrinth of downtown LA's gray municipal buildings and empty lots. As we pick our way through one-way streets, I ask about her beauty routine (minimal), her workout routine (opposite of minimal), and why her hair is so thick when she's two years older than I am and mine hasn't looked like that since I was 24. "I’ve been working with Virtue for three years," says Garner, mentioning the hair-care line she's a spokesperson for, though it does seem like she’d use the line even if they didn't pay her. "It actually works. I’m religious about the shampoos and conditioners — they’re total game changers."

Just when we think Google will never figure out where we are, Garner spots an unlikely covered stand at the entrance of a vacant parking structure. "Is this where we’re going? If it is, I’m very proud," she says, pulling up to a valet of the SoHo House. Her pride is not unwarranted: We’re here.

A few minutes later, we’re sitting at a bright corner table, overlooking downtown. Within seconds, a waiter appears, friendly but not overbearing, versed in exactly the right distance to give a celebrity. This is Joseph.

"What can I get you ladies this afternoon?" Two mint teas, tuna ceviche on tostadas, and guacamole with fresh vegetables. Making California proud.

Michael Kors dress. Makeup colors: Clean Line Gel Liner in Twilight by Ilia and Glazé Lip Lacquer in "Splash" by Code8.

"There is what I’ll talk about and there's what I won't talk about," she says as the waiter vanishes. And, she adds, drawing that line is especially hard for her. "That's tricky for me because it doesn't come naturally."

"It's also a fun part about being a woman," I say. I would hate to go through life without the connection I can have with an almost-perfect stranger provided she's a woman. It's the feminine lingua franca.

"I know!" says Garner. "You go deep right away: ‘How are you? Nice to meet you. What is happening with your vagina?’"

Well, now that the gates have cracked open… "I just learned that our vaginas may collapse," she tells me. "I saw my OB this week and she gave me a pamphlet about vaginal collapse." Garner's eyes get wide, reliving the moment in the doctor's office. She grabs her watch: "I’m like: ‘When? Is it imminent? Do I need to put it in my calendar? What is happening?!’ Have you ever heard of that?"

"No." But thank you, now I’m a little freaked.

"It's a thing."

"Is it a thing that's going to happen to all of us?" I ask.

"No, it's just a possibility."

"Wait. Is this the same thing that happens when you pee if you sneeze?"

"No, that's not collapse. Collapse is like you can't have sex because you can't get in there because it's collapsed on itself." [Editor's note: To state the very obvious, this is not medical advice. If you have an issue, please see your doctor.]

Our mint teas arrive. Did Joseph hear anything about a possibly imminent collapse? If he did he's not letting on. When you’re a waiter at the SoHo House in Los Angeles, you know when to listen selectively.

Garner is a pro at being an open book. And when she asks a question you can't help but think that she truly cares about the answer. She seems like what we all want in a friend, which makes it feel particularly sad when she says that there was a time not very long ago when she wasn't like this at all. "There were two decades where it was really hard to hold a conversation," she says. "Not in a woe-is-me, poor celebrity way. I was on baby watch every single day. The day after I had a baby, [the paparazzi] were watching again. They kind of rush you through your life because they’re just trying to get to the next stage of something they can sell."

For reasons relating to my lack of international fame, I had never considered that, if you’re someone like Garner, the paparazzi hold a remote control to your life. Speed up to the birth, pause on the weight gain, fast-forward through the menial tasks, rewind to every past relationship. It's one thing to feel like someone is always watching you, but to feel like they are judging, controlling, eating popcorn as you work your way through life? That seems extremely claustrophobic, to say the least.

Max Mara headpiece. Makeup colors: Killawatt Highlighter in Trophy Wife by Fenty Beauty and Velvet Matte Lip Pencil in Red Square by Nars.

During those years, Garner cut off all celebrity news. "I learned a while ago that I’m way too sensitive to what is written about me, my family. The only things I have on my phone are The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal," she says. "I can't even have CNN. I used to love the Huffington Post, but anything that has a celebrity section" — she shakes her head. Sometimes, she sees other celebrities and has no idea "that they got married and had a baby."

In the intervening years, she's also been able to yank the remote control out of other people's hands. In 2013, Garner and Halle Berry helped push the California state government to protect the children of celebrities from the paparazzi. It worked and the bill passed.

"The paparazzi have calmed down so much for me that I’m back to being in the world," Garner says. "I’m not getting chased into the grocery store to have whatever is in my cart photographed. Maybe my life is happily boring enough that there's nothing to see here. I think social media helped calm it down, actually. You have your own relationship with people."

Garner really has created an unmediated relationship with the world on her own terms. She's become internet famous for presenting the world's kindest, most normie social media presence, a public persona that is somehow exciting for being somehow… not dramatic. She created a world that is sweet and inclusive and easy. If Jennifer Garner can have a fake restaurant for her kids in her backyard, why can't I? NBC called her Instagram account the "last uncorrupted corner of the internet." It is a joyous, energetic, self-deprecating elixir to the feel-like-shit-about-yourself-your-choices-and-your-skin feed of the rest of the World Wide Web.

Maybe it's ironic from a woman who "didn't want to be on social media," Garner says. "I became a cofounder of Once Upon a Farm [an organic, plant-based children's food company] and part of my deal was to sell it on social media. I went into it kicking and screaming. And Mo, who had been my assistant for years by then, has a film degree from Northwestern. She's supersmart and has amazing taste, so I said, ‘Mosy, we’re doing this together.’"

Listening to her talk, it seems like the post-divorce Garner household is some kind of woman-centric ideal of child-rearing. Four women (Garner, Mo, and two others) are constantly cooking, cleaning, making Instagram videos, doing all the things you might expect. But there is also camaraderie and companionship. "It's like a little coven of women," she says. Then she pauses and leans closer (even not-listening Joseph can't hear this): "I really love my solo life."

I ask Garner what her life would have looked like if she wasn't acting. (Directing and producing don't count.) Remove Hollywood completely. Who would she be?

I am completely unprepared for her answer: "I would have really liked being a minister," she says. "My mom thinks I still will be. I grew up in such a lovely church in the United Methodist Church, and the minister was like the den parent. What I like about the study of religion, it reminds me of the study of theater — it's really a liberal arts education. You have to understand history, geography, literature. It's art, it's everything. I don't know anything about Hinduism, Islam, so many other religions, and I wish I did. That feels like a sign of respect."

I have never been religious. But sitting here, talking to a woman I’ve known for only a few hours, may be the closest I’ve ever come to thinking that a lack of religion has been a great loss.

"I think the more you engage, the more you learn about different ways that people believe and worship, the more you can sit next to anyone and be a neighbor," says Garner. "There's such value in that to me. I don't know that I will ever be someone who is writing a sermon Sunday morning, but I like the idea of it. I like the idea of going back to divinity school."

Garner goes to church with her kids, and her eldest — the one who was so wonderful to my own daughter — teaches Sunday school.

"As a kid, my family and I, we always referenced this one beautiful sermon," Garner recalls, "where our minister talked about taking something hard that had happened and imagining yourself going down to the banks of the river and fashioning a beautiful box out of what you find there and placing this hurt carefully in the box and watching it float down the river. The power of letting go. Don't carry it. Just let it go."

She continues, "So many times, my sisters and I have said, ‘You need to put that in the river.’ I’m not coming from a place of, ‘I have this unshakeable faith that I have to share.’ It's coming from a human place — a place of respect and curiosity."

It's late afternoon. Time to leave Joseph and head back to the valet, the freeway, the city. As we get back in her car, I’m still trying to imagine Garner as a minister. I ask if she has any regrets. "You can't have regrets in life," she says.

"Of course you can," I tell her. "I have plenty. Maybe you’re not trying hard enough?"

She shakes her head. "First of all, what's the point? They sink you, and for what? There's nothing to be gained." Garner is famously disciplined and "nothing to be gained" feels like it could be a mantra. Maybe even a sermon.

"We have to be mentally disciplined if we’re going to survive," she says as we drive. "You have to be tough on yourself. You have to do the things. You have to work out because that keeps you mentally steady. You have to work through your shit. I have made my own way. I’ve made my own money. I knew not a soul and I did it."

Despite her near saintly Hollywood reputation, Garner's own perspective is a bit more nuanced. "When Alias came out," she says, "I was so celebrated for being a hard worker, a dream of a number one on the call sheet, all of those things. Now I look back and I think, God, I was such a pain in J.J.'s [series creator Abrams] ass."

Finally, we’re back where we started, the workshop studios, now empty. Garner pulls up next to my car and as I put my hand on the door handle, she has one last thing to say: "Listen, please let me know if you need anything." It's celebrity interviewing etiquette: Don't hesitate if you have follow-up questions.

"Sure, I’ll reach out to your rep," I reply.

"No, no, no. I mean, sure, but that's not what I meant," she says. "I mean, if you have any parenting questions or if I can help with school stuff for Finn or Frankie, all of that. I’ve been through a lot of it already."

Jennifer Garner, a woman who has no reason to remember the names of my children, wants to help with school stuff, with teenage stuff — as a friend, as a neighbor. It's an invitation to be part of her small, lovely coven, if only for a moment.

I pause, a little speechless, and thank her for an offer I’ll never take her up on but will always be grateful for. For now, I say goodbye and get into my car. It's early evening. Garner has plans tonight and I need to call my kids.

Jennifer Garner's Beauty Lineup

"You forget how good it is to scrub dead skin cells full of old makeup off your face. These are awesome because they resurface the skin with a little glycolic acid. I use them once a week."

"Blends in perfectly, just the right amount of coverage. Dummy proof. It's been my favorite for years and I’m only on my second stick."

"Safe, 100% effective and available at your drugstore. You don't need to spend a billion dollars for great skin." [Garner is a brand spokesperson.]

"I brush conditioner through the ends of my hair in the shower. This brush makes sure I reach every strand."

"Nothing has changed my hair like Virtue's patented protein — Alpha Keratin 60ku. With this combo, damage to your hair will disappear and you’ll feel like a different person, trust me." [Garner is a brand partner.]

"I brush conditioner through the ends of my hair in the shower. This brush makes sure I reach every strand."

"You feel better with a little color but suntans are not worth the risk of skin cancer. This is my favorite answer to summer."

"Forever a devoted fan of this cream blush in ‘peony.’"

"Great, natural, affordable oil. Use after you shower. It's safe to use…anywhere!"

Photographer: Tom Schirmacher

Stylist: Yashua Simmons

Hair: Adir Abergel

Makeup: James Kaliardos

Nails: Temeka Jackson

Production: Viewfinders

Top image: Ami jacket. Michael Kors top. Tiffany earrings.