Jennifer Garner is making a bold return to Hollywood, and she has no regrets about prioritising her career after years of focusing on motherhood. The 54-year-old actress, who has six projects lined up including the highly anticipated miniseries The Five-Star Weekend premiering on BINGE on July 9, says she will not apologise to her children for working.
A Shift in Priorities
Garner, who shares three children—Violet, 19, Fin, and Samuel—with ex-husband Ben Affleck, took a step back from acting over the past decade to raise her kids. She averaged just one project per year during that time. Now that her children are teenagers, with Violet studying at Yale University, Garner feels ready to reclaim her career.
“I relate to that feeling of like, ‘OK, I gave everything to mothering. I’m still their mum, I’m not going anywhere, I’m still all-in. I’m also really grateful to have this part of my life back,’” she told InStyle. “When I work, I don’t apologise to my kids for it.”
Reflecting on the Past
Garner also reflected on her divorce from Affleck in 2015, which prompted her to further retreat from the spotlight. “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 explained. “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.”
Now, she is embracing her comeback with renewed energy, unapologetically taking on projects she loves. “To have this year and a half where I just indulged [in acting], because this job is very selfish,” she said. “It’s all about your schedule. It’s not about what the kids have going on at school. It’s not about pick-ups and drop-offs and making it home for dinner.”
The Five-Star Weekend
The first of her upcoming projects is the Peacock series The Five-Star Weekend, which premieres on BINGE next month. Garner stars as Hollis Shaw, a famed social media star and cookbook author whose perfect life unravels after her husband’s death. The grieving widow invites four friends from different stages of her life to a Nantucket getaway, but tensions rise and secrets emerge.
Garner says she has never identified more with a character. “The more I read, the more it surprised me, and the more it resonated with me, and all of the ways that Hollis and I are alike were kind of shocking to me,” she told Hello! magazine. She also enjoys incorporating her love of cooking into the role: “I have found that cooking in front of a camera, this is the first time I’ve ever used something that I love, which is cooking and baking, on camera as a character.”
The series also stars Gemma Chan, Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden, and Chloë Sevigny. The Five-Star Weekend premieres July 9 on BINGE.
