Jennifer Garner came close to getting elected for a spot in Aaron Sorkin‘s The West Wing back in the day but when it didn’t work out, the actress set off on a solo trip to the desert to lick her wounds.
“God, I wanted it so badly,” Garner told Emma Grede on a new episode of her Audacy podcast, Aspire, that dropped Tuesday. “I got down and I tested for it, and when I didn’t get it, I had to go to the desert — my first time in Palm Springs by myself — and just sit there for a couple of days.”
Garner called it a “mourning” process after losing the part on such a “good show.” Though she didn’t reveal for which part she auditioned, it was previously reported that she tested for the role of Ainsley Hayes on the NBC drama, a part that eventually went to actress Emily Proctor. Garner had told Flaunt that at the time she had considered it the biggest loss of her career: “I love Aaron Sorkin’s writing. I love words. I love how dense the language and the dialogue [is].”
While she was devastated, a career-making opportunity was just days away from falling in her lap. “Two weeks later, Alias came to me,” Garner told Grede of the J.J. Abrams-created action series that cast her as international spy Sydney Bristow and catapulted her to fame. “Like, what is it? God’s rejection is divine, divine … protection? Rejection is God’s protection. … I’m all for that.”
Garner was also all for discussing the ins and outs of her career, how she adjusted to fame, coming to terms with having to deal with the paparazzi’s intense obsession with her life, and building a successful business in Once Upon a Farm as co-founder and chief brand officer.
On the career front, Garner revealed how she and her manager had a strategic conversation about jumping back into work after her split from husband Ben Affleck. “I panicked when I was first out of my marriage and realized I had taken such a step back in my work, and suddenly I realized, like, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work. This isn’t a career that’s like, ‘Hey, you’re 60, you’re 55, you’re 43? Come on, let’s pay you more than you’ve ever made,’” she explained. “I was suddenly like, ‘Wait a minute. I have to take care of myself. I have to take care of these kids. I didn’t get some huge payout.’ So what is it gonna be? We just got very calculated and [manager Nicole King] was like, ‘How can you work?’”
Garner responded with her pre-requisites: “I said, ‘I can work in Los Angeles. I can’t leave these kids for six months at a time.’ I would love to. I love going on location. That is not this time in my career. And so it was like, OK, what can we make happen? How can we do it? And we just got really targeted and still about it.”
About the paparazzi, Garner revealed that the swarm surrounding her and her young children became so intense that she looked into relocating. “We tried to move. We looked at schools. I applied at schools. People across this country would be like, ‘Yeah, actually, they came and toured. She applied. They did the whole thing.’ But we realized that, you know, the pictures of us at the time were so valuable. If we were on location somewhere, if we were trying living somewhere, they would just buy a big camera and get in their minivan and follow us.”
That option didn’t prove to be “any safer,” she continued. “So it was just like, oh, my gosh, we might as well mess up the city we’re already messing up. Like, they don’t know what to do with us in Boston when we do this.”
Watch the full episode below.
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