Jennifer Garner got refreshingly candid about her decades in the public eye, reflecting on her relationship with the paparazzi at the height of her marriage with ex Ben Affleck and the “Stockholm syndrome thing” she has with one longstanding photographer.
“It was totally ludicrous,” Garner told Evan Ross Katz on Netflix’s “Shut Up Evan!” podcast Tuesday. The actress and producer, who sat with the talk series in promotion of Peacock’s “The Five Star Weekend,” admitted that she knows complaining about fame is a privileged problem to have — “It felt like poor little me, you know, my poor little kids who have everything in the world.” But she emphasized that some situations saw the paparazzi being “a danger to everyone around us.”
“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,” she recounted. Garner was even asked to remove their children from the local kids’ soccer league because too many photographers would follow her and her family to the games.
“It wasn’t just about us; it was just an industry that had gotten out of control,” Garner said.
“So, as much as I recognize that, you know, we are privileged and lucky and grateful for all that that has afforded us and all that that’s made available, at the same time, it just got silly, and kids were at the center of it,” she continued. “I mean, I lived on the street with a lot of much more famous and successful people than I, but they followed me because I had the kids. They wouldn’t follow Ben. They wouldn’t follow Matt Damon. They wouldn’t. They were like, ‘There’s the chick with the kids.’ That’s when you know it’s just it’s not right.”
Asked if she believes today’s landscape of paparazzi and celebrity culture has “changed dramatically” in the years since, Garner shared that she still has two photographers “every day” follow her because they’ve been assigned to her for “20-plus years.”
“I have a very interesting relationship with my main guy. I mean, I’ve done anything to ask him to leave, and at the same time, we have an odd respect for each other,” Garner reflected, admitting that she has experienced “some really real-life moments” with the unnamed paparazzo. She’s even turned to him for safety.
“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 he would, that he and I would be OK,” Garner said. “You know what I mean? Like, 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?’”
Watch the “Shut Up Evan!” podcast segment in the video below.
