Ben Affleck Once Felt Ex Jennifer Garner Put Him to Shame With ‘Daredevil’ Fight Scenes
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are used to doing fight scenes and physical stunts in movies. But when it came to shooting Daredevil, Affleck asserted that Garner definitely had the edge on him.
Jennifer Garner put Ben Affleck to shame with their ‘Daredevil’ fight scenes
Affleck and Garner both played superhero Daredevil and assassin Elektra in the 2003 superhero feature named after Affleck’s Marvel superhero. Being a superhero movie, the film required the pair to engage in more than a few fight scenes.
Whereas Affleck wasn’t too experienced in that department, Garner already had an advantage as she spent years choreographing fights on Alias. So when it came time for the two to face each other on camera, Garner may have had an easier time.
“Jennifer’s great, she’s fabulous,” Affleck once told MTV News. “She’s actually better at [the fighting] than I am. She has had so much training from the Alias thing and she’s a dancer, so she shames me every day.”
Garner, however, was as impressed as she was troubled by how quickly Affleck adapted to the film’s fight choreography.
“I had a year of Alias under my belt as boot camp where I fought every couple of days and so I came in, probably, more confident than Ben,” Garner once told Phase 9. “But the annoying thing was how quickly he caught up. I, I was a little bit cocky after the first couple of days and then all of a sudden he was kind of crushing me and that, that was a problem for me. But, yeah, I, I trained, you know, I was a ballet dancer growing up and then I trained for Alias and, and fought constantly all year.”
Jennifer Garner joked that she wished ex-husband Ben Affleck was more protective of her during fight scenes
After Daredevil, the two would end up dating each other before getting married in 2005. They would enjoy a long marriage that lasted for thirteen years before their official 2018 divorce.
During their years together, both Affleck and Garner would still maintain movie careers, with Garner occasionally jumping back into the action genre with movies like The Kingdom. The film starred Garner as part of a government team assembled to take down a group of terrorists.
The Kingdom’s fight scenes were a bit different from what Garner was used to doing. The film’s director, Peter Berg, wanted Garner and her co-stars to go down and dirty when it came time to throw fists.
“So, it turned out to be an amazingly real scrabble. We loved shooting it. We had a blast,” Garner once told Collider.
Affleck was used to his wife at the time engaging in these types of on-screen battles. So when he stopped by The Kingdom, instead of worrying about Garner’s wellbeing, he rooted for her.
“I wish he felt that way about real life. He was visiting the set the day that I shot this fight scene and I thought it would have made him a little bit nervous to see him chucking me against the wall harder and harder with every take but he was a little too calm about it,” Garner recalled. “Between us, I thought he could have been a little bit more, ‘My wife! You’d better be careful with her.’ He was just like, ‘Go! Go for it, babe! Harder!’”
