Jennifer Garner thinks about others a lot, sometimes more than she thinks about herself, but when she turned 50 on April 17 of this year, she decided to celebrate herself in style (just not her own style, necessarily).
“I basically had a wedding for myself,” the actress said in an interview with Town & Country. “I was so shocked that I was doing it.”
At this wedding-birthday party, Garner asked her guests to fill no fewer than 5,000 backpacks with food for a family of four, to be donated to Blessings in a Backpack.
“I put everyone to work,” she explained, adding that they had danced to the Osborne Brothers’ “Rocky Top.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Garner addressed her reputation as being a fundamentally “nice” person. “I have no reason not to be nice. My life is lovely,” she said.
“I’m not always just nice. I can also be salty, and I can be taciturn, or I can be really serious about what I want to get done. It’s not that I feel I’m underestimated in that way—I’m not afraid to stand up for myself and say, ‘Just so you know, this isn’t going to fly with me.’ When that happens, I don’t want you to be shocked that I’m a real person.”
Garner is a dedicated philanthropist, notably as a board member for Save the Children, for which she helped on the ground in eastern Kentucky and central Appalachia, when historic floods hit the area.
Her “niceness” also shines through in the activities she often engages in, such as visiting a local farmers’ market, sharing emotional messages dedicated to her children, or washing her cat in the sink. Never change, Jen.