Jennifer Garner got extremely candid in a new interview with Vanity Fair about the breakdown of her marriage to Ben Affleck, her future, and even the #nannygate scandal that plagued their split.
Garner made it clear that her love for Affleck hasn’t gone away, and she’s a bit heartbroken that the institution of marriage has "failed" her twice now. She was also married to Scott Foley until in 2004.
“I didn’t marry the big fat movie star; I married him,” she told Vanity Fair. “And I would go back and remake that decision. I ran down the beach to him, and I would again. You can’t have these three babies and so much of what we had.”
She went on to call him “the love of my life,” gushing that he’s the “most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous.” On the other hand, he’s also a “complicated guy,” she admitted. “I always say, ‘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.”
After many months of rumors, Garner and Affleck confirmed they were ending their 10-year marriage. But as Garner explains in the new interview, that difficult decision didn’t come easily. She admitted her “heart’s a little on the tender side right now.”
“I’m a pretty hard worker. It’s one of the pains in my life that something I believe in so strongly I’ve completely failed at twice," she said. "You have to have two people to dance a marriage."
The Miracles In Heaven star shares three children with Affleck; Violet, Seraphina and Samuel. She continued to say her dream of “dancing with my husband at my daughter’s wedding” is over now, but she will continue a friendship with him because of the way their kids love him “so purely and wholly.”
Garner even addressed the rumors he cheated with their nanny, denying he was unfaithful. “Don’t worry—my eyes were wide open during the marriage,” she said.
“We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny,” she said. “She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.”
“I have had to have conversations about the meaning of ‘scandal,’” she said about explaining the media frenzy to her kids.