Jennifer Garner hints the 'messiness' of her Ben Affleck marriage still haunts her as she returns to screens

It has been over a decade since Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck called time on their marriage, but the 53-year-old actress is making it clear — in the most eloquent way possible — that some wounds don't simply fade with time.

Garner is currently doing the rounds promoting her new Peacock drama The Five Star Weekend, based on Elin Hildebrand's beloved novel, and her words in a recent interview with Emmy magazine have set tongues wagging on both sides of the Atlantic.

The comment — framed as a reflection on her character — felt to many like something far more personal. Garner plays Hollis Shaw, a food influencer coping with loss who gathers four friends from different chapters of her life for a coastal weekend in Nantucket, where secrets surface and relationships shift.

It's not hard to see why she connected with the role immediately.

"When I read the pilot script, I felt like, 'Oh, I would be so heartbroken to see anyone else play this role,'" she said.

Garner and Affleck married in 2005 and separated in 2015, with their divorce finalised in 2018. The couple share three children — Violet, 20, Finn, 17, and Samuel, 13 — and Garner has consistently put them front and centre during what she has described as a turbulent chapter of her life.

In a separate interview with InStyle, she opened up about how the fallout from the marriage directly affected her career. "When my kids were little, I worked so little, and then we had such an upheaval in our family, that I really hardly worked for a long time," she admitted. She described her recent return to acting as almost indulgent by comparison: "It's a gift to have this year and a half where I just indulged, because this job is very selfish. It's all about your schedule."

Those words echo a much-discussed 2016 Vanity Fair interview, conducted while the pair were still separated, in which Garner was remarkably candid. "I didn't marry the big fat movie star; I married him," she said at the time. "He's the love of my life. What am I going to do about that? He's just a complicated guy. When his sun shines on you, you feel it. But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it's cold. He can cast quite a shadow." It remains one of the most honest celebrity interviews in recent memory, and its words have never really lost their sting.

Whatever personal material Garner may be drawing on, her new project sounds like an absolute treat. The eight-episode miniseries — premiering on 9th July 2026 — boasts a seriously impressive ensemble cast including Chloe Sevigny, Gemma Chan, Regina Hall and D'Arcy Carden. By all accounts, the chemistry off-screen was just as electric as anything in the script.

Garner, who also served as an executive producer on the show, reportedly kept morale high throughout the shoot by arranging food and coffee trucks almost daily — and even baked her own blueberry buckle coffee cake for the cast and crew. Because of course she did.

One of the more striking threads running through Garner's recent interviews is her refreshingly no-nonsense attitude to the mum-guilt many working mothers wrestle with. "When I work, I don't apologise to my kids for it," she told InStyle. "I do thank them for being so sweet about it. But that's part of life. Working hard is part of life, and messing up is part of life."

It's a sentiment that feels hard-won rather than rehearsed — the kind of wisdom that only comes from actually living through the chaos. For celebrity watchers who have followed Garner's journey from Alias action hero to Hollywood's most quietly dignified divorcée, there is something genuinely moving about watching her step back into the spotlight on her own terms. The messiness, it seems, has made her stronger — and if The Five Star Weekend is anywhere near as compelling as the woman promoting it, viewers are in for a very good summer indeed.