Jennifer Garner: The Spy Next Door
March 6 -- Rolling Stone magazine has called Jennifer Garner, the star of ABC's Alias, "Jackie Chan in a slinky cocktail dress." Time called her "the assassin with dimples."
In Hollywood, strong female characters tend to either have superhero powers, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or be mindlessly cheerful, like the Charlie's Angels girls.
But now there's a new action heroine in town. In one season, Garner's combination of karate kicks and acting chops has propelled her from obscurity to the Golden Globes, where she won the award for best actress in a TV drama. In the process, she has changed all the rules about female action characters.
As double secret agent Sydney Bristow, Garner has zoomed sci-fi thriller Alias into one of the hottest shows on television. Garner, 29, describes her character as a "regular girl in an extraordinary world."
She scales walls, jumps off buildings, derails international conspiracies, disarms nuclear devices and speaks every language known to man. And she does it all dressed in outrageous disguises: a maid one minute, a sexy siren in skintight spandex the next.
With a combination of beauty, physical grace and a refreshing ability to play big and small scenes well, Garner is even a surprise to the man who created the show and chose her for the part, J.J. Abrams.
Abrams had envisioned the character as a girl-next-door type with a secret life as a "tough Amazon." When he first saw Garner in a guest-starring role in Felicity, he knew she could play the nice girl, and suspected she could do the darker side, too.
Choosing a relative unknown for a lead role in a prime-time television series is risky, and Abrams says industry insiders were initially skeptical about Garner. He called her back to audition five times before taking the plunge and casting her in the pilot.
But when he saw her in rehearsal, he knew he had made the right choice. "Every time we did a scene, she just knocked it out of the park. It was, like, an incredible thing to see," Abrams remembers. "It was like watching … an Olympic athlete just sort of do her thing."
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