Jennifer Garner Once Popped a Blood Vessel Doing a Film About Divorce
Jennifer Garner once had to relive the realities of divorce in the film The Tribes of Palos Verdes. And in the dark drama, she tapped into her role so much that she sustained a real physical injury because of it.
How Jennifer Garner felt playing a single mom in ‘The Tribes of Palos Verdes’
Garner had a chance to flex her acting chops in 2017’s The Tribes of Palos Verdes. The coming-of-age drama saw the actor playing a mother who learns that her husband’s being unfaithful, forcing a massive lifestyle change. The movie could’ve hit close to home, as Garner dealt with a very high-profile divorce from ex-husband Ben Affleck. But it seemed that her own experiences had little to do with the emotions she channeled for her character.
“Anytime that you’re playing someone who is going through something, you have to just figure it out, and you actually — believe it or not — don’t use your own life as much as you might think,” she once told Entertainment Tonight. “You just get into that place. That’s your job, and then you shake it off, because you have to go home and raise your kids. It’s just like any other time I do a scene with an emotional place.”
According to the film’s director Emmett Malloy, Garner threw herself into this harrowing sequence with such force that she physically hurt herself.
“That scene in particular, I know that Jennifer said that she popped a blood vessel. So that kind of sums it up,” he added. “She just joined the crew and was really with it, and didn’t have a trailer and just sat there every day in that house and did scene after scene.”
Ben Affleck once shared that divorce made him a better actor
Garner and Affleck’s divorce both affected their careers in different ways. Garner already invested a large amount of time into her family when it was still intact. So much so that her agent had to coerce her into returning to work. Divorcing Affleck, however, meant Garner had the opportunity to make up for lost time in regards to her career.
Affleck also felt he’d grown from the experience. In his personal drama The Way Back, Affleck tapped into certain feelings for the feature that maybe he wouldn’t have been able to without those experiences.
“For me, the movie was much more about the fact that — whether it’s having lived enough years, having seen enough ups and downs, having had children and divorce — I’m at a point now in my life where I have sufficient life experience to bring to a role to make it really interesting for me,” Affleck once told The Hollywood Reporter.
Still, he wished his marriage didn’t get to a point where divorce was necessary. It made Affleck face certain uncomfortable truths about himself.
“I didn’t want to get divorced, I didn’t want to be a divorced person, I really didn’t want to be a split family with my children,” Affleck said. “It upset me because it meant I wasn’t who I thought I was and that was so painful and so disappointing. In myself.”
A source once claimed that Ben Affleck wanted to reconcile with Jennifer Garner
Affleck and Garner have both been very candid about how they tried to salvage their marriage for their sake and their children’s. According to one Us Weekly source, Affleck might’ve still tried reuniting with Garner even after their split was announced. But at that point, Garner was ready to move on for good.
“She put her heart and soul into fixing the relationship and wanted so desperately to turn things around for the children’s sake as well as theirs,” the source said. “She forgave him for so much, and still he couldn’t change.”
