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'Hey, it's that actress from Alias, she's married to Matt Damon's friend," says a pedestrian to his pal on a cliffside path overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Far below us, Jennifer Garner, barefoot in a blue sundress, frolics in the sand for a photo crew from In Style magazine. I'm watching the action with Garner's mother, Pat, who looks every inch a grandma - grey-haired and plumpish with a West Virginia twang - but not apparently related to the gazelle cavorting a hundred steps below.

"Jennifer Garner," says the pal. "Married to Ben Affleck." Immediately, both guys start honking like the duck in the Afflack Insurance commercial, "A-ffleck A-ffleck" They wander off, still quacking.

"You know," Pat says sweetly, "that happens all the time."

Lucky for Garner, having a husband whose name recalls an annoying ad is probably the worst thing in her life right now; the rest looks pretty great. At 35, she's growing into the angles that make her face so changeable -- solemn and severe when serious, sunny and childlike when smiling. She seems happy with Affleck, whom she married in 2005. She's madly in love with their daughter, Violet, not quite 2. And her next two films showcase what she can do.

Garner can play the chick roles, because women like her. (The second of three girls in her family, she radiates a middle-sister vibe.) In the upcoming Juno, which delighted the critics and won first runner-up for the audience prize at this month's Toronto International Film Festival, she plays an adoptive mom who starts out prissy, but deepens into the emotional linchpin of the movie. "If Jennifer wasn't Jennifer, the film wouldn't work," its director, Jason Reitman, told me at TIFF.

And in The Kingdom, which opened yesterday, she exercises the machisma that wows her male fans, who dig seeing her kick ass in hot costumes (in her undercover-agent TV series Alias, and as a comic-book heroine in 2003's Daredevil, where she met Affleck, and its spinoff, 2005's Elektra). She plays an elite FBI agent whose team, including Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman, investigates a terrorist attack inside a housing compound for Western civilians in Saudi Arabia.

"What it's really about is the futility of violence and revenge," Garner says over breakfast the morning after her photo shoot. "And how there can be a cultural gap that's impossible to overcome, even though on some levels we're all the same. We want our kids to do well, we want our freedoms." She laughs. "But it's going to freak my mom out, because I say the F-word a ton. She's never heard me say it."

"Gosh" seems more Garner's speed. As a toothy, glasses-wearing teenager, she played in her public-high-school band, served coffee at her church and planned activities for the kids she babysat - the type of young woman who glides under the radar until one startling day when she wears something fitted and takes off her glasses, and the boys' knees buckle. At breakfast, she orders oatmeal - the most wholesome thing on the menu - and speaks swooningly about breast-feeding, watching her daughter's language develop and the push-pull of motherhood versus career.

"I've loved every job I've ever had. I get a lot of my identity from being a woman who gets up and goes to work," she says. "I'd always assumed work would continue to be as important to me as it had been, but I don't feel that way at all. Even coming to do this interview this morning, leaving Violet in the high chair going, 'Mama, up, up' I had to tear myself away."

On the other hand, "I feel lucky just to get a job," she says. "Look at the big movies from last year: Were there any women in Letters from Iwo Jima? Apocalypto had one major woman's role - she spent the movie in a well. The Departed had Vera Farmiga, who made the most of [a smaller part]. In The Kingdom, I'm it. It's a rare pleasure when I get to have scenes with women."

Being the only female had its perks, though. "It was heaven, because those guys treat women so well," Garner says. "Jamie is such a gentleman, old school, his grandmother taught him. We shot in Arizona in the summer, it was 130 degrees, and he was the first one to come stand over me with an umbrella. Jason's like a brother; he needles you. [She supported him like a sister, suggesting that Reitman cast him in Juno.] And Chris is such an incredible actor, but also thoughtful and kind, quietly, subtly funny. Nothing fazed him."

She calls their director, Peter Berg, "a crazy person, very unorthodox." (His previous films include Very Bad Things and Friday Night Lights, kinetic frappés of character study and action.) "He's one of those people where you think, 'This can't be coming together, he's far too weird and spontaneous for this to be any good.' Then you see a take, and you realize that he so knew what he wanted the whole time.

"He was wild. He's changing lines, yelling them out to us, has three cameras going at once. He's dancing at the monitor listening to Christina Aguilera and it seems like he's not paying attention, but he's watching every moment. When he gives you direction, as nutty as he is, and as much as you want to say, 'Peter, you're crazy' - and you can say that to him - you appreciate it, because he's really good. His films are full of spontaneous moments. A lot of stuff that Jason and I improvised is in the movie. It's just background chatter, but it's very real that way."

By contrast, Garner characterizes herself as "a person who keeps buying datebooks because I want to be a person who's organized enough to use one." She's reading up on global warming because "it middle-of-the-night freaks me out." She's also scouring parenting books because, "I'm confused what my role is with disciplining [Violet]. She's too little, but at the same time she's starting to be smart enough to manipulate occasionally. I'm not going to just let that go. Day to day, I don't know what I'm doing. But you do get to grow up with them."

The beauty in the surf with the cameras trained on her, she insists, is also still a small-town West Virginia gal, whose engineer father would have preferred her to major in chemistry and who makes her favourite meal - roast chicken with gravy - the same way her mother did. "I'm just the lame-o who became an actor seeking the attention she didn't get as a kid," Garner says, laughing. "My mom will be the first to tell you. Just this visit, she told me, 'I feel so bad that I don't remember your learning to walk. I remember Melissa and Susannah but I don't remember you at all.' She says that about all kinds of things. I just say, 'Okay, oh well.' " And then she smiles, and finishes her cereal.

Jennifer Garner

Born April 17, 1972, Houston.

Enrolled in university in 1990 to study chemistry but changed major to drama. Graduated 1994.

Married actor Scott Foley, with whom she appeared in the TV series Felicity, Oct. 19, 2000. Divorced 2004.

Married Daredevil co-star Ben Affleck June 29, 2005.

Gave birth to first child, Violet Anne Affleck, in Los Angeles, Dec. 1, 2005.

Scheduled to make Broadway debut in November of this year as Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac, with Kevin Kline in the title role.

Selected filmography

Mr. Magoo (1997)

Dude Where's My Car? (2000)

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Daredevil (2003)

13 Going on 30 (2004)

Elektra (2005)

The Kingdom (2007)

Juno (2007

fame gamejschneller@globeandmail.com