Jennifer Garner Reveals Her Kids Don't Like Watching Her Films Because of This Reason
"It's different," says Jennifer Garner when she discussed why her kids don't like to see her films but don't mind when it's their father, Ben Affleck, on screen. The ex-couple are parents to three children: 18-year-old Violet Anne, 15-year-old Seraphina Rose, and 11-year-old Samuel. She told InStyle why her kids are hesitant about her and not her baby daddy.
While making confessions, Garner detailed what her kids like or don't like, "My kids don't love to watch me in things. They do to be supportive, but I think it's a little weird to watch your mom kiss someone or cry," adding, "It's different." However, she said their children feel differently about their dad and her ex-husband, Affleck.
"They don't mind watching their dad," Garner added. "They don't want to see me sad, and they don't want to see me in a romance. They don't love seeing me play someone else's mom, honestly." The 13 Going on 30 actress has had an extensive Hollywood career since the 90s and delivered several good films.
However, when it came to her new project in 2023, The Last Thing He Told Me, a television mini-series, the 51-year-old managed to get her daughter Seraphina on board. "I loved, loved, loved the book," revealed Garner while referring to her Apple TV+ thriller, which has been adapted from a 2021 novel by Laura Dave.
"I read it aloud with my middle child at bedtime, and we could not stop," she continued. "It pushed bedtime later and later because the book has this super-propulsive quality, really driven by two things: life-and-death stakes that keep shifting when you least expect it, everything turns on a dime again and again and again," reported People.
The movie's plot explores "the relationship between this woman, who never expected to be a mother and was not particularly gifted at it, and this young woman, who never expected to have a mother and wasn't really good at that." However, Garner found it challenging to "play a character who's not maternal at all."
I've played a mom quite a bit, and that is actually lovely because it's very easy to slip into mothering some awesome young actor, and then you build a relationship under it, so at the end, you're quite close."
Unlike Garner, the kids sat together to watch a film of their father Affleck, "The first movie of mine that my kids actually sat through together was Armageddon because they like movies where they can make fun of me, and they really like the idea that I was an astronaut or an oil driller, or they just found the whole thing kind of preposterous, but they loved it."
The Gone Girl star added, "But the first movie that I cared about and was really interested in what my children thought was Good Will Hunting, which I watched with two of my now, three kids," reported The Hollywood Reporter. "They were engaged and interested."
