The Ballad of Jennifer pt. 2 (Garner edition)

Jennifer Garner has a new series coming to Peacock this summer, The Five-Star Weekend, and she is talking exclusively to In Style ahead of the series’ debut about work, motherhood, and work-life balance.

The interview is okay, propelled mostly by Garner being so dang charming, but the photoshoot is fire. Jen Garner is a total smoke show, ready for summer.

Ben Affleck, you f-cking moron. I will never not say it.

In this profile, which reiterates Garner as America’s eternal good-girl crush, with particular emphasis on her “oh shoot!” cooking videos and down-home appeal, two things jumped out at me as actual interesting information. One is that Garner’s baby food company, Once Upon a Farm, went public and was valued at $724 million. A big deal was made a while back about Ben Affleck selling an AI company he co-founded to Netflix for $600 million. This should be at least as big of a story as Affleck’s company sale, given the success of the IPO, but some googling shows that while the business press covered the IPO, Garner’s business success hasn’t broken into the wider consciousness the same was as Affleck’s. Hm.

The other point that jumped out at me is when Garner talks about balancing her career with raising three children, and then going through a very public, years-long divorce: “When my kids were little, I worked so little, and then we had such an upheaval in our family, that I really hardly worked for a long time.”

That immediately pinged my radar, and I checked Garner’s IMDB page just to be sure, and I think we need a clearer definition of what “worked so little” means. Violet Affleck, her oldest child, was born at the end of 2005, when Garner was at her millennial peak, with Alias going strong on TV and 13 Going on 30 ruling movie theaters. From 2006 till 2020, when the pandemic sends everyone’s CV into outer space for a minute, Garner did not pass one year without at least one acting credit to her name.

I just wish we could be a bit clearer about “worked so little”, because she makes it sound like she stopped working, but she didn’t. She DID take smaller roles, often in smaller movies, which would reduce the number of days she worked per year, for sure. But that’s not the same thing as actually stopping work.

There is another angle to that work-life conversation, though, that is completely left out, and I KNOW it’s because Jen is mostly too nice to bring it up, and that is that during that same mid-2000s to mid-2010s period when she and Affleck were married and raising kids, HIS career was going gangbusters. As an actor, Affleck was making films like Hollywoodland, The Town, Argo, and Gone Girl. As a director/producer, he made Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo, and he won a Best Picture Oscar for Argo.

So Garner wasn’t just slowing down—phrasing I prefer to “worked so little” because it refers to momentum not output—to raise their kids, she also supported Ben Affleck’s superstar career. HE did not slow down AT ALL. He, in fact, accelerated professionally. Which is not at all unusual for men, it is frequently wives and mothers who see their careers slow down while raising children, while their husbands don’t miss a step. Men, in fact, tend to make more money after starting families, while working mothers often make less.

I wish that was part of this discussion, though I don’t expect Jen Garner to go there. She has hinted here and there about the difficulty she faced as her marriage to Affleck collapsed, especially so publicly, but she’s never really talked about their divergent professional tracks BECAUSE of their marriage. She didn’t stop working when they had kids, but she did change the kind of work she did, she became more famous for being a wife and mother than for her acting roles for a solid decade of her life.

It is only since their divorce and as their kids hit their more independent teen years and started to leave the nest, that she is returning to leading roles. I just wish there could be a little more honesty about what happened, that Jennifer Garner, just at the point of becoming a huge star, took a back seat so that Ben Affleck didn’t have to slow down as they started/expanded their family. And then he said he felt “trapped” by her. Did you feel trapped, Ben? Or did you feel BAD?

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