When Jennifer Garner joins our video call as “Jen Garner,” the abbreviation feels both fitting and conflicting.  On one hand, Garner is the perennial girl next door and America’s mom, but the casual moniker also feels at odds with her icon status. The actor has been a Hollywood mainstay since 2001, when she was cast as the lead in beloved spy drama Alias. This was followed by roles in Juno, 13 Going on 30, and Dallas Buyers Club, to mention just four of her diverse 60-credit oeuvre. She’s been the recipient of a Golden Globe and a SAG Award, was anointed with a star on the Walk of Fame, and her marriage and divorce from Ben Affleck has trickled in and out of brunch conversation for two decades.

On this given Thursday morning in mid-February, Garner is in her LA home. She’s framed by a doorway and a panel of blue cabinets, the counter of which is strewn with objects: a tea towel, papers, and a wooden-framed sign that reads “The office of farmer Jen.” Her signature brown hair falls wet around her shoulders, and starts to gently wave as it dries. Clear, oversized glasses frame a bare face, and subtle, diamond drop earrings are suspended in the air above a black, possibly cashmere, sweater. Someone brings her a steaming mug of what I presume is herbal tea, though I’m just making assumptions based on the aura she gives off: calm, wholesome, and health-conscious.

Garner is in the midst of the promotional run for the second season of Apple TV+ drama, The Last Thing He Told Me. The show follows Hannah Hall (Garner), a wood-turner whose husband vanishes when the tech startup he works for is investigated for fraud. Overnight Hannah turns into a sleuth and mother, exhibiting superhuman patience with her recalcitrant teenage stepdaughter. The show is an adaptation of the book of the same title, produced by Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine (The Morning Show, Big Little Lies), delivering the kind of atmospheric, binge-worthy drama we’ve come to expect from the production house.

To prepare for the role, Garner learned to turn wood, using handheld tools to shape it as it spins on a lathe. In the lead up to season one, she would practice for up to six hours a day, and credits Hannah’s steely resolve with the inner stillness the craft fosters. “It’s part of why she’s able to come out with something just on the fly and just go with it because she knows how to get still and see what’s in the distance, what needs to happen,” she says. This level of involvement isn’t new for Garner, whose dedication has long bordered on method acting: while auditioning for Alias, she practiced Taekwondo daily, and when we speak she’s come from a gyrotonics workout so she can match John Cena’s energy in One Attempt Remaining, an upcoming The Hangover-style action comedy. “There’s that saying if you’re on Broadway, be stronger than your show. And I think that’s true for what we do as well,” she muses.

The Last Thing He Told Me’s second season, out February 20th, lenses the fallout as Hannah’s husband risks it all to return, an eventuality Hannah has doggedly been preparing for. “It’s really fun to watch all of that unlock one bit after another as the inevitable danger enters their lives, and to watch Hannah and Bailey, all the things that they’ve done to prepare. Even playing it, doing it, it was incredibly satisfying,” she says. The season also includes a lot more “running and gunning,” which, considering the physicality of Alias, is a return to form for Garner.

It also sees her reunite with friend and collaborator, Judy Greer (Men, Women and Children, Carrie). “She’s such a formidable actor. And all of us on set were so excited to have her there, to have her elevate the scenes, to have her surprise us the way only Judy can. She just has a different line reading in mind than you can ever expect.” We’re only eight minutes into our conversation, and Greer is the third co-star Garner has lavished with high praise. She’s already mentioned The Last Thing He Told Me co-stars Angourie Rice and John Cena (“he’s the number one Make-A-Wish endowment person”) and will later extol the entire cast and crew of Alias for getting her through early fame, when there was “a lot of drama” in her life. (Garner is cryptic about what drama she’s referring to, but it was around this time she and her first husband, actor Scott Foley, split.)

But if that fame hadn’t come via Alias, it would’ve resulted from something else. In the early 2000s, Garner was turned down for the role of Ainsley Hayes in The West Wing. It’s the loss she considers the biggest of her career. (Actor Emily Proctor got the role.) “I love Aaron Sorkin’s writing. I love words. So I love how dense the language and the dialogue [is]…I wanted that role so badly.” Sorkin sent her a note when she was turned down, but she still had to go to the desert for a few days to lick her proverbial wounds. Less than a month later, she was cast in Alias. “Maybe that getting close to something primes you and you are more ready, I don’t know what it is.” What she does know is that it was the best pilot she’d ever read.

Of Garner’s diverse filmography, 13 Going on 30 looms largest. Not long before I interviewed her, my friend, who had a 13 Going on 30-themed 30th last year, conjectured that Garner was just like her character. In some ways, she was right. Like Jenna Rink, Garner is bubbly and warm, but she also exudes the kind of self-assuredness you’d be hard-pressed to find in a teenager trapped in a woman’s body.

13 Going on 30’s impact on pop culture is impossible to overstate. On Instagram, referencing the film has become a way for women to reclaim a decade we’re socialized to dread. After all, not too long ago, being 30, flirty, and thriving (a line in the film that’s quoted like Shakespeare), would have been perceived as mutually exclusive. “There’s never a day that I don’t get splashed by some 13 Going on 30 love… It’s so special to be part of something that is a comfort watch for people that means something to people, that represents a celebration to teenagers and to grown-ups.” Garner says that if Gary Winick—the film’s director—had not passed away (he died from brain cancer in 2011), there would have been ample sequels. “May he rest in peace,” she says, then reconsiders. “May he rest in laughter.”

It’s around this point that Garner—who has been dating businessman John Miller for seven years—digresses to explain that the ring on the fourth finger of her right hand (which, flipped in the Zoom square, appears to be her left) is not an engagement ring; that she’s not making an announcement by gesticulating her answers. “I actually have taken over my own left hand, my left ring finger, because I don’t care… I just feel like I’m in my 50s (Garner is 53), I own my own fingers.”

When I assure her that I wouldn’t print that without checking if it’s true, she seems surprised. It’s a reflex that tracks. In 2015, Garner and Affleck, who share three children, announced their separation. The split was major gossip fodder, and the couple’s interviews about the breakup were de-contextualized in the tabloids. (“It used to be so much more gotcha,” Garner remarks at one point.) When Affleck reunited with ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez in 2021, the blended family were hurled back into the media panopticon. For a time, Garner was quiet, but spoke about it, if cautiously, in a recent interview. What changed?

“Time has passed, and other women are going through really hard seasons in their lives, and I think it’s helpful to know that time will go on and you will get to the other side,” she stresses. “That’s really all it’s about. I was in the middle of something for a really long time, and it didn’t make sense. There was no way to talk about it, and it’s certainly not my place to talk about him or his experience or anything he’s gone through, or my children or their experience. But I can say that I feel lighter and happier and more myself [than I have] in a really long time, and I think that’s important to know because I really felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, has this family shake up—has it changed me forever?’ When you’re many years into something, you think, ‘I don’t know how it’s gonna pass.’”

Has she ever considered opting out of it all? Of moving out of LA and doing something else entirely? “Yeah, of course. But fame follows you, is one thing… Now I think I could do it and I would be fine, but now I have a different relationship with it, and I really love my job. I chase those moments where it all comes together and I feel connected to what I’m doing and open and surprised. And look, it doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it really makes it worth it.”

Alongside her work, children—both her own and the world’s—are Garner’s raison d’être (she’s never beating those “America’s mom” allegations). She’s been working with Save the Children since 2008, and in 2017 joined as co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, a farm-fresh children’s food company (hence the “office of farmer Jen” sign). The produce is available nationwide, but, more importantly to Garner, is accessible via food benefits programs WIC and SNAP. It’s here that Garner is at her most animated, and it becomes clear that, in some ways, acting is a means to an end. “Fame for me now is so much more about—I really, really, really care about what I can do for kids in the world and in America, rural America. And if I am not out there with something new to promote and new to talk [about], then I’m less helpful in that way.”

Before Thanksgiving, Garner travelled with Save the Children to the Appalachian mountains in Clay County, West Virginia (Garner was born and raised in WV), an underserved area where the nearest grocery store is 30 minutes to an hour away. She gushes about the Mountaineer Food Bank’s arm The Extra Mile, which sees volunteers deliver food to people who couldn’t make it to the distribution. “What I love the most, and is the thing I’m probably the most proud of, other than my kids, sitting here and talking to you, is that in every one of those distributions, Once Upon a Farm is in there.”

As she explains why people need these services (being unable to afford gas, their cars needing expensive repairs and being balanced on bricks), she chooses her words carefully, seemingly conscious of sounding in any way performative or condescending. “You have to find a way to see people who don’t live like you do. And to not just see them, but be with them, breathe with them, live with them. And it even feels weird to say ‘them.’ It’s like we have to remember that we are all the same.” She waves her hands in a circular motion, ushering the world into her orbit. “It sounds all too highfalutin.” The postcode lottery, I suggest? “Yes.”

Throughout our interview, Garner makes several unprompted references to the theater. She tells me that her calling may have been in children’s theater as a clown (she reckons her proclivity for “taking it all the way” is why she loves action so much); that as a child she wept happy tears from the chorus line of her community theatre; that just yesterday, her mom reminded her that when she arrived at college, she auditioned for a play before she sorted out her books. “I like a captive audience,” she admits with a grin. So although Garner hasn’t appeared on a stage (other than to present or collect a gold-plated statuette) in almost two decades, I have to ask: is a return on the cards? “I have kids at home for four more years, and I don’t want to rush that… But if everyone in my family is stable and it makes sense… then my hope would be to see if I could get a play somewhere.” Garner reels off playwrights like a true thespian (“I like anything that has a cadence to it”), but is modest in her aspirations. “I don’t think I could do musical theater anymore, although I would love to, I would just be happiest in the chorus, or the old lady roles…. I wouldn’t be brave enough to say that I would want to do Shakespeare, but if there’s a Shakespeare festival somewhere that needs somebody to come in and play Juliet’s nurse, I would be down.”

But for now, Garner is a far cry from the fringes: later this year she’ll appear as the titular character in comedy drama The Five-Star Weekend, a Peacock adaptation of a book by Elin Hilderbrand (author of The Perfect Couple). Garner plays a beloved chef-fluencer who coalesces five women from her past in Nantucket for a five star weekend. Per Garner, the program, which boasts an all star cast of Gemma Chan, Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, and Regina Hall, is dramatic, hilarious, and woman-centric. “Oh my gosh, I loved the sisterhood of making that show.”

After Jen signs off (I decide the nickname does fit her when I instinctively call her that myself) I open Instagram. A photo of a friend’s birthday cake fills the screen. Emblazoned in slick, dark chocolate icing are the words “30, Flirty, and Thriving.” I see what she means about it all coming together.

Photographed by Tyler Patrick Kenny

Styled by Anna Katsanis

Written by Juno Kelly

Hair: Adir Abergel at A-Frame Agency

Makeup: Kara Bua at  A-Frame Agency

Nails: Temeka Jackson at A-Frame Agency

Flaunt Film: Meech Ward

Photo Assistant: Jay Sivayavirojna

Styling Assistant: Jasmine Betancourt

Production Assistant: Ameen Kher

Location: Interwoven Studios