Jennifer Garner's Keys to "The Kingdom"

Spunky, friendly Jen Garner's personal kingdom is flourishing lately. She, baby daughter Violet and hubby Ben Affleck seem to have fallen into a solid family groove. Ben has been directing and Jen acting while they take turns caring for their daughter and spend as much time together as possible.

Now, Jennifer plays a tough forensic specialist and trained commando in the action thriller The Kingdom where she uses brains and serious, kick butt athleticism alongside her male costar Jamie Foxx. You can then see Jennifer in Juno, a dramady in which she plays a woman wishing to adopt a teen mom's baby and, she goes into rehearsals soon for her turn on the Broadway stage in a revival of "Cyrano" where she plays femme lead Roxanne. Busy girl!

We love to chat with Jen. She enters a room all bubbly, and she's just funny and candid. Jennifer is that great mixture of tomboy tough and femme sweet. Wearing a cute, black Jenni Kayne dress and high, black slingback heels, the very animated actress made silly faces and used her hands a lot while she talked. Violet has a very funny mom! We learned all about Jen's stuntwork and fight training, working in the super-heated desert on the film, her family plans and looking for good female roles in film.

TeenHollywood: Okay, cute dress. Who is the designer?

Jennifer: [pawing at the neck of her dress] I want to say Jenni Kayne. I'm bad with clothes. I want to dispel pregnancy rumors [she smoothes the dress down flat over her tummy].

TeenHollywood: Done! So, people cheer at your fight scene in this movie. You've done a lot of amazing fight work but this may be your best. How did you feel about the intense fight scene at the end of the movie?

Jennifer: Well, to be honest, I thought it wasn't going to be much of anything. I kept saying to my stunt double Shauna Duggins who I've worked with for six years, who's really my partner in crime and one of my best friends, I said to her 'when are we gonna have rehearsal for this fight scene?' We go in a hundred and ten percent prepared. I could still do the fights from Daredevil in my sleep and a bunch of the 'Alias' ones. Those went by like that [she snaps fingers]. I kept saying, 'where are we gonna rehearse? I'm getting nervous. Isn't there a fight?' And she kept saying to me, 'we don't need to rehearse'.

TeenHollywood: I can't believe that.

Jennifer: Well, that day, I showed up and her eyes were this big and her hair was out to here and she had just learned the fight and she said, 'this is unlike anything we've ever, ever done. Get ready. We're just going to try to beat the shit out of each other. This is just a fight where you try to kill him and he'll try to kill you'. So, it turned out to be an amazingly real scrabble. We loved shooting it. We had a blast.

TeenHollywood: So it was more down and dirty than choreographed?

Jennifer: It was so down and dirty that we had scratch marks that we had to cover up on my face for the next few days where he tried to grab me and pull my face off. He [her opponent] had a scab on his ear 'cause I bit his ear and I just yanked and got his ear and went 'yuk' [she indicates spitting out part of an ear]. It was nasty. It was great.

TeenHollywood: What does your husband think when you do these fight things? Does he know how tough you are and wouldn't mess with you in a movie?

Jennifer: 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 [her opponent] chucking me against the wall harder and harder with every take but he was a little too calm about it. 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!'

TeenHollywood: Does motherhood determine the kinds of projects you take on now?

Jennifer: I don't take or not take a role based on the physicality. If Shauna says something is safe, I'm gonna do it. I'm not gonna be killed for a couple of bruises. What are a couple of bruises? [Violet] doesn't care. She's just a kid and I'm fine. But, there is a natural priority and there never has been before. I probably would have worked straight through this year because lots of great, fun things came up, but I can't bear to do something that I don't have to do because she's so delicious.

TeenHollywood: Shooting out here in the desert, how was that? We hear you got sick?

Jennifer: I spent two nights in the hospital. That was entertaining. Out of all the stuff I've ever done, I had never gone down before. I'd never had to go to the hospital. I'd worked so many more hours than this and I just couldn't believe.. I never fainted or anything like that. It was 'Jennifer Garner collapsed on the set'. Never at all. I just was dizzy and I didn't feel right. When we were on our way home I said, 'I feel not right enough that I don't know if I can pick up my child so let's just go get me checked out' and it turned out that, basically, after all was said and done, it was too hot and I was in the heat for too long every day to still be breast feeding for my body. So, I slipped myself into heat stroke.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about the training that you got for playing a commando-style FBI agent in The Kingdom?

Jennifer: We just joined a class out of the blue with this group of FBI officers who were in evidence response training from all over the country. They were in LA learning about bombs. And we just walked into their class, me and Jamie and Jason Bateman, and they were all kind of like, 'Huh? Sydney Bristow is in our bomb class?' [laughs] And it was great. We learned a ton. And then we spent a day with them also learning about fingerprinting and all kinds of evidence response, or retrieval kinds of things. We did a paint gun thing where the actors simulated the kind of mission that we would actually be on in the movie. And it terrified me. I was so grateful that I don't have to do that in my life, and that it's pretend.

TeenHollywood: Did you talk to a lot of female FBI agents?

JENNIFER: So many. It was great. I would just be around them, and looking at them. What was their hair like? What was their make-up like? And saying, 'what's in your pockets? What do you have in your pockets?' 'Well, I always have these gloves, I always have one set. I always have candy for a stressful situation.' So I stole that. 'I always have something to write with.' And so my pockets in the movie, whether I used that stuff or not in the scene, I was always going to prop guy, 'Okay, I think I need some more gloves, and I think I need some more lollipops.' Those women are incredible. They are real women in the middle of the country that are armed and ready to go into a really hairy situation. And they have kids at home, and they go home most nights, but every now and then they have a bank robbery to deal with.

TeenHollywood: We hear a lot of the dialogue was improvised Tell us about improvising.

Jennifer: When you're talking about improvising and speaking off the cuff, you're working with the best when it comes to Jamie. And Jason Bateman, he never stays on book once. [laughs] He's incredibly deft at coming up with stuff right in the scene. So you did feel like you needed to be really prepared so the scene could kind of go anywhere, you know what I mean? But it's also [director] Pete [Berg] sitting at the monitor listening to Christina Aguilera saying, 'Yo, Jen! Say this! It's funny!' So you say it and then you see it in the movie, and he was right. It was hysterically funny. But at the beginning, on television, you don't improvise. At least, in any experience I've ever had. You stick to the script, the script is Bible. Of course, I had been trained in that stuff and I had done it a lot growing up, but it had been a while. And it was great to, bit by bit, every day, be a little more comfortable. And it was so good for me.

TeenHollywood: This movie deals with some Middle Eastern characters and some of them are sympathetic.

Jennifer: Well, what makes this movie great to me is that it really is you see everybody in the movie 360 degrees. Our Saudi Arabian counterparts, you see Ali's character at home helping his father kneel into prayer position. He's humanized to you. You see Ashraf's character at home with his kids and his wife, and at the end of his day, and what his life is like. And so there's no judgment put on anyone. The film very much says, 'We are all the same.' And that's what I loved about it. I loved that there are no solid heroes. It's not like the US is coming in there with guns blazing and 'We'll take care of this!'

TeenHollywood: Has the film sparked more curiosity in you about the Middle East?

Jennifer: I did read several books and do some research just to be as familiar with it as possible. But I am not a particularly outwardly political person. I leave that to the other half of my family. [laughs] And so I focused as much, if not more, on Janet Mayes [her character] and being a forensics expert, and what it would be like for her in that circumstance as much as what our relationship is overall.

TeenHollywood: Ben has just directed Gone, Baby, Gone. Are you putting in a bid to star in Ben's next movie that he's going to direct?

Jennifer: I don't think I would ever star in a movie that Ben directed because somebody has to raise the kids but he'd better, eventually, find a little something for me or he'll pay for it [laughs].

TeenHollywood: Are roles with strong female characters hard to come by?

Jennifer: Look, think of any movie that you see. Think of this movie. How many men are there? How many women are there? One. That is every single movie. I mean, any time an actress gets to work with another actress, it's like, 'Oh, there are two of us in a movie! How are you? Let's sit in the hair chair together!"' We're lonely women. Women get screwed in this industry. But yes, it is hard to find roles at all, much less strong females.

TeenHollywood: So you are going to play a great female character; Roxanne in 'Cyrano' with Kevin Kline on Broadway. Is that a dream role?

Jennifer: [Theater] has always been my absolute dream of all dreams and all of this stuff that I've done has been accidental. I always, always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that, when I got a mini-series, I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob. Now, every time they talk about theater, it's kind of like 'welllll' but this I couldn't pass up; working with Kevin Kline, being in New York in the Fall, doing this role, getting to say these words.. just thinking about it, I get so excited.

TeenHollywood: What was the play you were understudying?

Jennifer: 'A Month in the Country' with Helen Mirren and Ron Rifkin. I watched every performance. At the time, when I was living in New York, I went to everything Victor Garber did. I saw four things. I was such a fan of his and, when they told me that in 'Alias', it was going to be Victor and Ron, I was so nervous the first few times I met them, I couldn't even.... Ron remembered me as being the little kid understudy who is in the back of the theater so eager but I was so starstruck around them.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.