The second season of Jennifer Garner’s The Last Thing He Told Me premiered on February 20 on Apple TV+ and will air weekly through April 10. I loved the first season and highly recommend binging it if you haven’t watched it yet. It also stars hottie Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Angourie Rice.
For the past few weeks, Jen’s been doing a lot of promo for it, including appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Jennifer Hudson Show. I love a good Jen Garner interview. She’s always charming and totally prepared. She treats the press part of her job in the same way that physically trains for a role, which she also did for this season of TLTHTM. You can take the girl out of Sydney Bristol, but you can’t take the Sydney Bristol out of the girl. In a profile with Marie Claire Australia, Jen talked about her career, family and living in the public eye. Here are some of the highlights.
On her career as an actor: “The common thread is that each of those roles matters and is important. I’m always looking to flip what I’ve just done; that’s the fun of being an actor,” she says. “Although … I really do like when there’s a bit of action.”
On the physicality of her role in TLTHTM: “I love that element: that she actually has to grapple and fight for her life a couple times,” she says. “I do think Hannah would have learnt how to do that as part of preparing for any event or emergency. This is a woman who has stayed up at night for many, many nights, scared out of her mind, creating a plan.”
On what she’s most proud of: “My children. It never felt like a sacrifice [to raise them]. It was really hard to go to work and it definitely shaped the jobs I chose in a big way.”
On letting her kids be themselves: “They’re just so cool! Parenting now has shifted. It’s more about parenting with a button on my mouth … You have to let them grow up and make their choices. You don’t get to control it. [I’m] so proud of how they walk through the world, and proud of them for trying hard”.
On public interest in her family: “[It’s] the hardest thing. Not hard in the grand scheme of what is hard in the world, but tricky for me and tricky for my family. It doesn’t serve me to take in gossip about myself or anyone else, much less my kids, so I don’t do it.”
On her life now: “So much about my life surprises me. That I’m still working, that I’m still alive, that my kids are healthy, that my work relationships – which are more like familial friendships – are still the same as they were 25 or 30 years ago, but richer and deeper and stronger. It’s all a gift. I just feel so grateful to my job for giving me these people. And then, yeah, that I’m able to co-parent at this point in time with peace and equanimity and a partnership that I didn’t know [if] I would ever get back to.”
It doesn’t surprise me that Jen and Ben have found a peaceful, emotionally balanced way to co-parent. Jen is the type of person who shows up, whether it’s for her ex-husband, her neighbors, or even complete strangers. Ben has praised Jen for being such a great parenting partner in the past, too. For a while there, it looked like Jen was trying to keep things together for not only herself and her children, but for Ben, too. I think when Ben is sober and focused on working, he is probably pretty easy to get along and co-parent with.
I also understand what Jen is talking about in regard to how parenting has shifted to allow kids more freedom to figure out who they are. As for the public interest in her family, I think that given her own circumstances involving tabloid interest in her marriage and divorce, she’s done a really good job at protecting her children’s privacy. We used to see a lot more pictures of the Garner/Affleck family than we do now, but the only things we really know about Violet, Fin, and Samuel are the things their parents want us to know.
Photo notes by CB: These photos of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner together are from their son Sam’s 13th birthday party in March, 2025. Credit: Backgrid. They’re also shown at the Farmer’s Market in 2013 and outside church in 2018. Credit: Vanessa Pacheco, PacificCoastNew/Avalon. Other photos are from this month, February, 2026. Credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon. Also I could not resist the photo of her driving Ben to rehab.
I have so much respect for how Jen Garner has dealt with Ben over the years. She seems like a genuinely good person who has a lot of compassion, but is not a pushover. I also think her restraint is impressive. Ben is like a walking tabloid magnet and I think most of the interest in Jen and the kids is really due to how he interacts with the press (and tabloids). Their kids seem to really love both of them, though, so props to Ben there.
Healthy and generous co parenting is good. Ioan Gruffufydd has been pulverised by his ex wife online and in the press since early 2021 when they separated. They are currently in court over a request to make permanent the DVRO against Alice Evans who yesterday on the stand tried to claim she briefly lost her mind due to the shock of the split. However she has continued to harrass him and his wife online and via Alison Bogoff articles from the Fail ( she’s on a £30k retainer with the Fail to provide them with stories!) She destroyed his good relationship with his daughters and has spent the past 5 years marinated in wine and bitterness. She’s an adult and can choose to ruin her own life if she chooses but as a mother she is doing serious harm to her daughters. Marriage is a contract that is only enforceable if both partners agree to continue. Jennifer Garner has been generous, kind and patient and is a wonderful mother and great ex wife. Be more like Jennifer and lead a positive, healthy life rather than drown yourself in alcohol and bitterness like Alice Evans continues to do five years after a marital split.