While making the press rounds for her new series The Five Star Weekend, Jennifer Garner is also getting real about some of the challenges she’s faced while dealing with paparazzi.
During an appearance on the Shut Up Evan podcast, Garner spoke with host Evan Ross Katz about joining Halle Berry in 2013 as they advocated for new California laws to protect children from photographers. The two actresses testified before the California State Assembly Committee on Public Safety, and the law was later passed.
The children that she shares with ex-husband Ben Affleck are now much older — one in college and two in high school — but Garner reflected on how when they were younger, before the law, “it was totally ludicrous. And it felt like ‘Poor little me, my poor little kids who have everything in the world,’ but it was a danger to everyone around us.”
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She went on to detail how “if I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside. We were trying to have our little one play soccer, and the association asked us to stop because there were 20 cars coming” to watch the games.
Garner continued, “If you show up and you’re trying to get into the pediatrician and you have a sick kid on your shoulder and you’re scared and you can’t get into the door because you’re blocked by photographers, there’s something wrong with that. And the kids are paying the price. Kids were getting knocked over coming out of preschool by photographers who were so hungry to get to me or to Ben, trying to get to our kids.”
The star acknowledged that the family is privileged and grateful for everything that their Hollywood success has brought them, but “at the same time, it just got silly.” She noted that she lived on a street with much more famous and successful people, “but they followed me because I had the kids. They wouldn’t follow Ben. They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon.”
Garner also explained what things are like in current day, revealing she has two photographers that follow her every day and have “been assigned to me for 20-plus years, 25 years.” One in particular she has “a very interesting relationship” with, saying they “have an odd respect for each other.”
“We’ve had some really real-life moments together. I was followed by someone who, for whatever reason, I thought was going to hurt me, and I ran to him because I knew him and trusted him, and I knew that he and I would be OK,” she said. “There’s kind of a Stockholm Syndrome thing, and at the same time, I’ve called the cops on him a million times and been like, ‘Can you please just give me a walk around the block with my kids and my dog?'”
Garner is currently starring in The Five Star Weekend and also producing the upcoming 13 Going on 30 reboot for Netflix.
