Jennifer Garner is looking back on the difficulty of raising her three kids in Hollywood while married to a fellow A-lister in Ben Affleck and dealing with paparazzi culture.
The actress, 54, appeared on a new episode of the podcast Shut Up Evan with Evan Ross Katz, and among other highlights of her career and personal life, she candidly discussed how she’s been treated by photographers throughout her life.
More importantly, she discussed the harmful effect they had on her three kids, Violet, Fin and Samuel, especially during their early years, calling the fascination with their family “ludicrous,” adding: “It was a danger to everyone around us,” while still acknowledging the irony of her complaints seemingly coming from a place of privilege.
“If I went through a yellow light, 15 cars would go through the red behind me. They would drive up onto people’s lawns, even on a hillside,” she recalled, even looking back on some particularly noteworthy incidents in which the paparazzi actively harmed her kids’ lives.
“We were trying to have our little one play soccer. And the association asked us to stop, because there were 20 cars coming to try to [take pictures],” Jennifer revealed. At one point, she recalled a moment where she tried going to the pediatrician with one of her sick kids, but couldn’t because photographers were blocking the door. “The kids are paying the price.”
“Kids were getting knocked over coming out of preschool by photographers who were so hungry to get to me or Ben, trying to get to our kids, that it was just like, ‘You gotta stop, you gotta watch for the little kids. You don’t belong at a school, you know?'”
© Instagram“We are privileged and lucky and grateful for all that that has afforded us, and all that that’s made available. At the same time, it just got silly, and kids were at the center of it,” the 13 Going on 30 star added.
She noted, though, that she lived on a street with “a lot more famous and successful people than I,” but she was being followed because “I had the kids,” which meant that the famous husbands were often spared, including her own. “They wouldn’t follow Ben, they wouldn’t follow Matt Damon. They were like, ‘There’s the chick with the kids.'”
© Instagram“It wasn’t just about us. It was an industry that had gotten out of control,” she candidly admitted. Evan shared a clip of the discussion on his Instagram page, thanking the actress for “going into detail” on her experience with paparazzi.
“Really appreciated Jennifer Garner going into detail with me about her experience with paparazzi over the years and the horrifying lengths they go to endanger not just her and her family, but those around them — including little kids — all just to get ‘the shot’,” he wrote.
© Getty Images“That, and what she describes as the ‘odd respect for each other’ that she has for one paparazzo who has been assigned to her for decades. ‘There’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome thing, and at the same time I’ve called the cops on him a million times.'”
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