Jennifer Garner: Five-Star Human 

A hot new TV series, a near-billion dollar business, and she’s still the nicest woman in Hollywood.

Let’s get this out of the way early. If this story was about anyone other than Jennifer Garner, there is absolutely no way I would have written it. 

What happened was this: The day before I am to sit down with Garner, beloved star of screens large and small these past 30 years, as well as the central fixture of this summer’s sure-to-be-smash-hit Peacock series The Five Star Weekend, my 7-month-old baby and his nanny (the former being worn in a carrier by the latter) trip and fall on a steep canyon road near our home in Los Angeles. Their injuries are ultimately deemed superficial—scrapes and swelling, bumps and bruises—but his are dramatic looking and on his beautiful face, which hit the not beautiful pavement, and the idea that I could focus on anything else feels like a cruel joke. Obviously I must cancel. 

But then, this is lunch with Jennifer Garner, widely acknowledged to be one of Hollywood’s kindest stars, who has literally been called “America’s mom.” And did I mention that my partner is away on business for the week, and my family lives on the opposite coast, and that this is my first baby, and maybe some übermom energy would be nice? Garner is a mother of three now-teenagers-and-beyond whom she steered through her own very public and impressively amicable divorce from Academy Award–winning actor/director Ben Affleck 8 years ago. Surely if anyone would understand what it’s like to be navigating a tough parenting moment, it would be her. (“Honestly, she’ll probably make you feel better,” my sister reassures me when I call her for a gut check.) And so I do not cancel: Like mothers throughout history, I spend the night before an important workday anxiously watching my child sleep and making frantic deals with my higher power instead.

The next day, Garner arrives at the restaurant wearing thick tortoiseshell–framed eyeglasses, Saint Laurent jeans, a perfect dove gray Celine cashmere crewneck, and a nametag from her 14-year-old son’s school. “My Name Is Jen” it reads, with Jen written in blue ballpoint pen. This is unnecessary, of course; everyone in the restaurant is already excitedly pretending not to notice that Her Name Is Jen. “Well that’s embarrassing,” Garner says, peeling the sticker off and tucking it in her pocket, “I’m still in Lunch Mom mode.” Lunch Moms help monitor school lunch, she explains. Something to do with checking in and a clicker. They mostly “do it for the hugs.” I probably say something a little insane like, You’re such a good mom, and burst out with what happened 24 hours prior. Garner immediately locks in, in the way really good moms do, immediately separating the important stuff from the frantic blather. He’s okay? The nanny is okay? Of course you’re distracted. We can reschedule, she says, but we really can’t, timing-wise, and I tell her it’s fine, my kid and my nanny are actually right outside like the world’s cutest bodyguards. They’ll get me if they need me. Let’s go ahead. “If you’re really sure,” she says, and it’s clear that she means it. 

She looks away. Raising children is about surrendering control, she tells me; with kids, you have none. Things will happen—to them and to you—and there’s nothing you can control about it except how you react. “You have to raise yourself at the same time. And just be so radically kind to yourself about how imperfect it is. And that it is just going to be imperfect. There’s no such thing as balance. There’s no such thing as doing it right. And when the big moments happen, you are okay, and that’s on you to know and understand so your child feels your okayness.” I exhale. She spots someone, pauses. “Please give me one second.” She walks over to an elegant blonde woman waiting for a table, whom she taps on the shoulder then wraps in a silent, firm, restorative hug. They both nod at each other with tightly closed smiles, that way you do to keep from crying. It’s the kind of scene that could easily be ripped from one of Garner’s movies. “Sorry,” she tells me sincerely when she sits back down a moment later, “that’s one of my girlfriends I haven’t seen in a while. She’s going through a hard time.” Really, she doesn’t even have to be. Everyone wants to be hugged by Jennifer Garner. Possibly especially me. 

Garner is fresh off filming (and producing) a new project for Netflix, “I don’t know what we’re calling it—a comedy? A romance with some action?” she says. Its title is One Attempt Remaining, a caper co-starring John Cena, whom she considers  “a total bestie.” She got to break out some of her more hard-earned expertise for the role. “I’m a pacifist, but I understand every weapon,” she says matter of factly, rolling her ballet-molded shoulders back ever so slightly. That’s one happy side effect of having your breakout be Alias, on which she played a sexy butt-kicking spy for five seasons in the early aughts, or her recurring role in the Marvel universe as red-leather-clad assassin-for-hire Elektra, or a terrorism-fighting FBI agent in 2007’s The Kingdom, or a vigilante hell-bent on revenge in 2018’s Peppermint. “I can knife fight. I can do a compound bow and arrow. I’ve learned how to do all of this stuff. I want to use it,” she tells me between bites of poached chicken salad. “I’m 54, I’m not going to be able to do it forever.” She looks like she could. “Well, thank you, but eventually, my joints…” she shrugs. (She says this but she later kicks one leg up into the air to show off the Loewe boots she perfectly broke in on the set of The Last Thing He Told Me, so I think her joints are doing just fine.)

Picking up new skills—combative, equestrian, espionage, what have you—is one of the more fun aspects of the job, she says, better than learning how to lace a stethoscope around your neck in such a way that it looks like you do it 500 times a day, which she’s also mastered. But “Five Star Weekend is the first time I’ve ever actually known how to do what I was supposed to be good at, which was cooking,” she says. A quick refresher for the uninitiated: In late 2017, Garner started regularly posting what she called her “Pretend Cooking Show” on her Instagram, whipping up her favorite family-friendly recipes with her trademark gusto and gaining a very not pretend following in the process. 

She’s since taken the show to YouTube, where hundreds of thousands of people watch her make Blueberry Buckle or “Grandmom’s cornbread” from scratch in her palatial Brentwood kitchen while wearing pajamas and cozy sweaters, occasionally FaceTiming her mother for cooking advice (heartwarmingly, they always sign off, “I love you, and I trust you”). These videos have thousands of comments like: “It’s so nice to see an accomplished actress actually be a positive, intelligent, honestly good person too. Jennifer Garner brightens America’s day with these cooking vids!” and “This is the kind of content I would normally hate, because of my tiny, withered Grinch heart. Alas, I find it delightful, funny, fresh, and exactly what I suspect many of us need. Thank you.”

In The Five Star Weekend, adapted from Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 bestselling novel of the same name, Garner plays Hollis, an accomplished homemaker whose pandemic cooking blog inspires similar fervor from devoted fans, shifting her trajectory from happy homemaker to celebrity in early midlife (think: Ina, Martha, or an east coast Pioneer Woman). When Hollis is suddenly and shockingly widowed, she invites four of her best friends (her “four stars”) from different phases of her life to join her at her Nancy Meyers dreamscape of a Nantucket house in hopes of reinvigorating her joie de vivre. The friends are played by Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan, and they all bring what some might call excess baggage, to various extremes (the gamut runs from extramarital complications to the potentially lethal). There is an angsty daughter or two in the mix. Things do not go down without a hitch, despite Hollis’s exceptional menu planning and hosting abilities. The surprise return of Hollis’s childhood sweetheart, played by Timothy Olyphant, is also not uncomplicated. Much to the delight of fans, it’s also a real-life reunion for Garner and Olyphant, who worked together in 2006’s rom-com Catch and Release. “He does smolder well,” Garner muses, grinning. 

Five Star getting green-lit by Peacock was conditional on talent, Hilderbrand tells me via Zoom from Nantucket, and Garner was the network’s first choice, which made perfect sense to the author. For her, Garner was a version of Hollis already. “I follow her just like the rest of the universe, because of her fake cooking show,” Hilderbrand says. (She was even inspired to do her own, which she calls “‘Cringe Cooking’ because my kids find it so embarrassing.”) “What she represents for people is this sort of aspirational, but also relatable [figure]… and just the loveliest human being.” This despite being so very famous, including as the face of Capital One credit cards, which has kept her on our televisions regularly for the past 11 years, and the tabloid high-beam focus on her personal life. “Everybody knows who she is, right? I’ve seen her in public and she is always paying attention to people and is so gracious with them. If she saw children on set, she would go over and talk to them and take a picture with the moms. I mean, I don’t have that kind of patience,” Hilderbrand says. “I get stopped here all the time. I’m always nice, but if it was a Jen Garner–level, I probably would be like, I can’t leave the house or I have to have security or whatever. She just handles everybody so beautifully. She really does. I’m in awe.” 

Sevigny calls me from New York to confirm: Garner really is that nice. Nice to be around, to work with, nice to chat with between scenes, the whole picture. “I was like, it must be fake,” Sevigny says: “Nope! Take it from me. I got a real bullshit detector, you know what I mean?” That’s not to say Garner is overly saccharine or dopey, Sevigny notes; she’s incredibly smart, and has a work ethic like you wouldn’t believe. (Actually, Sevigny adds, seeing her body, you’d believe it.) “She can be tough. She has opinions. She knows what she wants and she fights for what she wants,” Sevigny says, “but the nice act is really not an act.” Garner brings everyone into the fold, says her co-star, she comes in and sets the tone, and it’s one of mutual respect and acceptance. “Maybe that’s what they call star quality.”

The cast took the island of Nantucket by storm last September, with locals and summer regulars tracing their every move and reporting it in the local papers and on social media. The Nantucket Current hit it big when, towards the end of the shoot, they got video of the five leads letting loose at local haunt The Gaslight for karaoke night, singing ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” with the guy who does the ghost tours. (“I don’t sing karaoke,” Sevigny corrects me on our call, “I kind of dance in the background like a drunken fool. And I think it’s not fair of people to film it!”) Says Regina Hall, “It was great to work on a project with so many women,” citing the directors, showrunner, writers, and cast. “It felt incredibly creative, like a long slumber party.” The team still has an active group chat, called, of course, Five Stars. Everyone is crossing their fingers for a second season. (After a four-episode sneak peek at the series, that includes me.)

Judy Greer, a frequent Garner foil on-screen and close friend off since they played opposite each other in 2004’s 13 Going on 30 (spoiler: they spar again in Five Star), says that even some 20 years ago Garner was the kind of leading lady who orders every single person on set a Jamba juice during a particularly trying multi-day dance sequence. “Just watching the way she handled her life and handled other people around her and handled work was just a really good thing to see” both as another young actress and as a young woman, says Greer. “This is a person who works really hard, she doesn’t complain, she doesn’t make her problems other people’s problems, and she assumes that if she wants something that other people probably want it too.” In 2017, Garner appeared in A Happening of Monumental Proportions, an indie movie Greer directed. “I’m sure it cost her,” Greer says, “because I think she got paid a nickel to do it, and then rented a portable pizza oven to make pizzas for the whole crew, because it’s Jen.” (Food as love seems to be a theme. Hall remembers fondly the food trucks Garner provided for the cast on Nantucket: “She must’ve had a secret desire to make us all gain weight!” she jokes.) 

Garner has been utterly unchanged in the decades they’ve known each other, Greer says, which is high praise in Hollywood. How do you sum up someone who has been supporting and inspiring you in equal measure for the past 20-odd years? It hit Greer as she was flipping through her stepdaughter’s high school yearbook, looking at the superlatives: “best actor, prettiest, whatever, and I was like, Wait, what the fuck is this? Best all around? What? So someone just gets best all around? Just the best in everything?! And I was laughing hysterically, but I think Jennifer Garner would definitely get ‘best all around’ if our lives were yearbooks.” 

Her mother grew up on the family farm in Oklahoma, but Garner was born in Texas—“my dad was a real Texan. His literal name on his birth certificate was Billy Jack. It was not William, it was Billy Jack”—and raised in West Virginia. “That’s home,” she says, where she used to pound the pavement as a tot, selling her neighbors 25-cent tickets for performances she’d put on in the backyard. She goes back regularly to visit her mom (a kind of star in her own right, thanks to Pretend Cooking) and one of her sisters, as well as to work with Save the Children, the charity she’s been aligned with for more than 15 years. Her work with the organization focused initially on bringing early childhood education programs to rural regions, and it was that work that showed Garner the massive gap in nutrition for underprivileged families. That was what inspired her to join up with her co-founders at Once Upon a Farm. 

Garner lights up when she talks about the company, which makes healthy fruit blends and bars and frozen meals for babies and toddlers and beyond, and which recently IPO’ed with a valuation of approximately $724 million. “It is 100 percent what I would have fed my kids,” she says today. “The transparency, all the things you dream that a company would have for kids and babies’ food, they’ve made happen. Any time there’s a choice to make—where there’s the right choice, but it’s harder, more complicated, more expensive, whatever it is, or the choice that most people wouldn’t even know—they always take the choice that’s best for babies, families, kids,” she shakes her head in disbelief. “I’m just proud of it.” 

Once Upon a Farm set out to reshape the future of food, she says, and that really is what they are doing, even if it’s only by forcing their competition to keep up. “There’s another company that is changing their puffs to sorghum, which we use, and it is so much better. It’s an ancient grain. It’s higher in fiber. It’s also better for the environment because as sorghum grows, it pulls more CO2 into the soil. And that’s because we did it. And so in that way, I still feel like we’re changing things even though it’s not our company. And maybe they’ll beat us. I don’t even care. But we’re forcing that change.” Now, she says,  she wants “all these big new companies to up their game in WIC,” the USDA’s special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children, and to offer more to families who rely on government-funded food. As of April, after a lengthy application and approval process, Once Upon a Farm is WIC-certified in 20 states; they are currently the first and only line of organic refrigerated baby food that’s eligible under the program. “That’s an area where I’m like, Hey, guys. We’re doing this, you can do it too!”

The success of Once Upon a Farm has changed what her free time looks like. Namely, that there isn’t much of it. There are team conference calls, farm visits across the nation, sales calls, her advocacy for Save the Children, and then her own kids, who are now 20, 17, and 14, and who she has proudly kept largely out of the limelight. Acting is the fun thing she gets to squeeze in when her schedule allows, now that the kids are a bit more independent. “I feel lucky because I really come at [acting] from a place of joy,” she tells me. “I’m not tortured. It’s not filling a hole. I just really love to do it. And I love to be around people who love to do it.” Truly. “I was really, really happy when I was working in summer stock and making a hundred bucks a week.”

Garner took a lot of time off from acting, first to have her three kids with Affleck, and then to deepen her focus on them once the couple separated in 2015. (They officially divorced in 2018.) “First of all, when you’re in a performance kind of role, you give up a year/year-and-a-half of performance while you are pregnant, having a baby, recovering,” she tells me. That doesn’t mean she stopped entirely—she still filmed The Kingdom (breastfeeding between fight scenes) and Juno during that period. But her agent at the time famously had to issue an ultimatum to get Garner to sign on to 2013’s Academy Award–winning Dallas Buyers Club: Say yes to this or let’s talk about retiring. She wasn’t ready to retire. But working was a conscious choice, and acting was never going to be her top priority. “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.” 

And yet Garner is full of gratitude—both for the fact that she still gets to do this job, as well as for her kids, who have been “such bricks” about all of the missed volleyball games and days that she couldn’t be Lunch Mom. It’s a gift, plain and simple, she says, “to have this year and a half where I just indulged [in acting], because this job is very selfish. It’s all about your schedule. It’s not about what the kids have going on at school. It’s not about pickups and drop-offs and making it home for dinner.” That said, selfish isn’t really what comes to mind when Garner outlines the main parameter she has laid out for her team: She only accepts projects that are primarily based in Los Angeles (the three weeks spent shooting in Nantucket for Five Star worked out to be about one-quarter of the total shoot time), both because she refuses to uproot her family for months at a time, and because she believes that Hollywood needs its stars to stand up for working locally so that everyone below the line on a set doesn’t have to uproot their kids in order to work, too.

Much of the source material for Five Star Weekend is about allowing yourself to grow and develop in middle age. That resonated with Garner. “I relate to that feeling of like, Okay, I gave everything to mothering. I’m still their mom, I’m not going anywhere, I’m still all-in. I’m also really grateful to have this part of my life back.” You know, she tells me later, as she finishes her mint tea and the neighboring tables quit pretending not to eavesdrop, “when I work, I don’t apologize to my kids for it. I do thank them for being so sweet about it. But that’s part of life. Working hard is part of life, and messing up is part of life. Tripping and falling—there’s room for all of it.” The kind of valuable lesson a supermom imparts. And just the reminder I needed.

Via: Instyle