Jennifer Garner reflected on the early days of her divorce from Ben Affleck and why she felt apprehensive about the future when they first parted ways.
“I panicked when I was first out of my marriage and realized I had taken such a step back in my work,” Garner, 54, revealed during the Tuesday, August 25, episode of Audacy’s “Aspire With Emma Grede” podcast. “And suddenly I realized, like, ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work.’”
The Five Star Weekend actress noted that her line of work wasn’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.’”
Garner noted that after she and Affleck, 54, called it quits in 2015, she had to find another way to ensure their three children, Violet, 20, Seraphina, 17, and Samuel, 14, were financially set if she didn’t have acting to fall back on.
“I was suddenly like, ‘Wait a minute. I have to take care of myself. I have to take care of these kids,’” she said.
Garner explained she had to ask herself, “So what is it gonna be?” which is when she and longtime manager and Linden Entertainment partner Nicole King Solaka, “got very calculated” and figured out how she could best balance her career and family life.
“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,” she recalled. “And so it’s like, OK, what can we make happen? How can we do it? And we just got really targeted and still about it.”
Gardner added that her food brand Once Upon a Farm was “very much a part of that play” and it has paid off.
“The crazy thing is it’s working,” she said of the brand, which was cofounded by Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz in 2015 before Garner was brought in and added to the list of founders.
Garner revealed on the podcast that although you can’t “just un-famous yourself,” fame doesn’t guarantee financial stability.
“Life is expensive, and you still have to kind of figure out how you’re gonna live. And just because you’re well-known by people does not mean that there is some great living being provided for you,” the 13 Going on 30 star shared.
Garner remembered that after her split from Affleck, “it became very serious to me really quickly as someone who had never given a lot of thought to money. Like, ‘Oh, I need to be an earner here.’”
Garner and Affleck met on the set of 2001’s Pearl Harbor, falling in love two years later while working on Daredevil. They tied the knot in June 2005 and welcomed their eldest daughter six months later. The actors welcomed two more children in 2009 and 2012, respectively.
The Argo director and Garner ultimately announced their separation in June 2015.
“After much thought and careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to divorce,” Garner and Affleck said in a joint statement at the time. “We go forward with love and friendship for one another and a commitment to coparenting our children whose privacy we ask to be respected during this difficult time. This will be our only comment on this private, family matter. Thank you for understanding.”
Their divorce was finalized in October 2018, and both Affleck and Garner have since opened up about the final days of their marriage.
“The truth was, we took our time, we made a decision, we grew apart,” Affleck revealed on The Howard Stern Show in December 2021. “We had a marriage that did not work. This happens. It is somebody I love and respect, but to whom I should not be married any longer. And then we said, ‘You know what? We tried. We tried because we had kids.’”
Garner opened up about the immediate aftermath of their breakup in January, telling Marie Claire UK, “You have to be smart about what you can and can’t handle, and I could not handle what was out there.”
She added, “The fact of it is what was hard. The actual breaking up of a family is what was hard. Losing a true partnership and friendship is what was hard.”
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