Jennifer Garner: The Spy Next Door

March 6, 2002 -- 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."

Jennifer Who?

A year ago, most people had probably never heard of Garner. She was another struggling Hollywood actress, who had managed to land small roles in the movies Dude, Where's My Car? and Pearl Harbor. Then she guest-starred in two episodes of Felicity, catching Abrams' eye.

She's no longer an unknown. Her show regularly leads its time slot in the coveted 18- to 49-year-old bracket, her face is on magazine covers, and she has the Golden Globe.

Not bad for a straightlaced girl who loved ballet and worked in a dress shop in Charleston, W.Va.

Her parents, Garner says, brought the three Garner girls up to be respectful and proper. Garner wasn't allowed to pierce her ears or wear nail polish.

Balancing Act

So, how much of Sydney Bristow is like Jennifer Garner?

"We're both able to just grit our teeth and do what needs to be done and not mince about it … We kind of just get the job done and it's not a whoop," Garner says.

"Other than that, I think she's a lot braver than I am. She's a lot better at martial arts than I am, and her hair's definitely always nicer," she adds.

Garner also says her character is much better than she is at keeping things secret. Sydney Bristow cannot reveal her secret life — in which she spies for the CIA and pretends to spy for a rogue group called SD-6 — to her friends, who think she has an esoteric banking job that requires her to travel often.

Sydney balances all that with graduate school classes, where she's studying to be an English teacher, and a mysterious and often chilly relationship with her father, played by veteran screen actor Victor Garber.

Not Scared of the Stunts

During shooting, Garner does most of her butt-kicking herself, without a stunt double. "She's nuts," says Abrams. "She wants to do every stunt possible."

To train for the part, Garner found a tae kwon do master in the Yellow Pages. And she has become used to some of the dangerous feats Sydney is expected to perform.

"I am not a person who ever even wanted to bungee jump. Now I find myself just hanging on a wire 100 feet in the air and just calmly waiting for 'Action!,'" she says, adding, "It's important to me that I am going through what she's going through."

Garner often has to perform her stunts in high heels — a tall order for a self-described "klutz" who can barely walk in heels at all. But she manages it on set: "I'll be holding a gun up and running downstairs in heels and all I'm thinking about is just counting down the stairs, trying to just make it out alive," she says.

And she has the bruises to show for it: "I'm not afraid to get a bruise and I'm not afraid to commit to something physically 100 percent."

Bright Future Ahead

Despite her newfound stardom, Garner remains a simple, grounded young woman from West Virginia. She and her husband Scott Foley, a Felicity co-star whom she met on the set, rarely make the Hollywood scene, preferring to stay at home gardening and cooking.

Garner's many admirers say she has a bright future. When Alias takes a break in production, she'll start shooting a superhero movie called Daredevil opposite Ben Affleck.

As for Alias, Garner hopes she's beating up the bad guys and being tortured by secret agents for years to come.

So does her boss. "I'm glad that I found her, because, you know, without her I think Alias could have easily just been another one of those shows that you hear someone was developing," says Abrams.

But if it all goes "poof," will the country's favorite high-stepping spy be left out in the cold?

"No, because the best thing that happened was that in my last bout of being a normal actor auditioning, I was happy. I was happy that whole year. And so if this goes away, I know that I'll be happy again," Garner says. "I'll take French classes; I'll audition — I love to audition; I'll be with my husband; I'll work in the garden; and I'll get another job."