Jennifer Garner tears up if she recalls the humble beginnings of her acting career.
Garner talked about her start in showbusiness during an appearance on Josh Smith’s Great Chat Show podcast.
She recalled her first showbiz related job, when she made $150 a week as an understudy on Broadway, working with the likes of Helen Mirren and F. Murray Abraham.
“It was such a surprise to me that I was understudying a play on Broadway. I thought like this was a success, and if that was as far as it went I would have been like, ‘I got to do this,'” she said.
The 13 Going on 30 star continued, “I got to watch Helen Mirren every night. And then from that, the fact that I was suddenly on set, it was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here.'”
She added, “And so I’ve felt that way the whole time. The surprise has always been bigger than my actual dreams, in a way…”
This led to her first feature film role in 1997’s Washington Square, in which she had a small role alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judy Ivey, Albert Finney and Maggie Smith.
“It was this beautiful Henry James novel and I had this very small role. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I went to the first ADR and I’d never done it before. They taught me how to do it,” Garner recalled.
At the time, she was staying on her friend’s kitchen floor.
“Claudia, my friend, was visiting me from London, and she was living on a boat on the Thames with her boyfriend at the time while I was living on the kitchen floor and we went to watch this,” Garner recalled.
“And there I am on an actual screen with Albert Finney and Maggie Smith, and we left that little ADR session and we went screaming, running down Broadway, jumping up and down,” she added.
“It makes me want to cry thinking about it. We were like, ‘oh my gosh, what happened? How am I in that? How is this happening?’ And we celebrated it in the most full-throated, full body way. And we were talking about it last night, how magical that exact moment was together,” she gushed.Â
