I missed this latest Ben and Jen conscious uncoupling People story when it came out Tuesday night, but in my defense there are so many stories about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner that it’s hard to keep up. They’ve been relentless in giving minute details of their lives to the press. This one is somewhat hilarious in that it spells out the living situation they’ve been selling us for months. It’s titled “Why Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner Are At Their Closest Since Split – But Not Getting Back Together” We get it!
“It took months for Ben and Jen to figure out a new normal,” a source close to the couple tells PEOPLE.
Now, “both Ben and Jen seem very focused about what’s good with their family,” the source adds of the pair.
“There’s no sign they’re getting back together,” the source says.
I’m only surprised that People Magazine is the sole outlet to have this story that I can find. I would expect to see it on US, E! and The NY Post by now but maybe they realize that they’re long past saturation point with the public. The Daily Beast has a new story titled Death is More Escapable than Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, but the actual article isn’t as snarky as you would expect. They just lay out how it’s nice that Ben and Jen are civil to each other in their respective press tours and that they’re both on message.
Meanwhile everyone is talking about the somewhat bawdy story Garner told on Jimmy Fallon. She said that her Versace Oscars dress was so tight she couldn’t breath and almost had a panic attack. The bodysuit she was wearing under it was impossible to unlatch on her own so she had to ask her friend to reach under and do it for her when she needed to pee. Ok. She said dude a few times, she made gestures explaining what a thong was and it just didn’t sound like her.
“You see I have a waist right here?” Garner asked her host. “I don’t have one in real life anymore … but what they do is they move your organs around.… There was a metal corset and it [took] two Italian people, who were talking very quickly, and the next thing you know, my ribs were compressed.… These people move your ribs, and they move your liver out of the side and they pop you in,” she said, laughing.
Four hours later, while watching the show with a close girlfriend, Garner’s body started to rebel against the tight metal corset. “You step into a bodysuit first … like a leotard, but it’s a thong. So I was in that, and we were watching the Academy Awards … and suddenly my ribs started to panic. Everything in here started to freak out,” she continued.
“[My friend] was like, ‘If you stand up, they’ll think you’re Kanye West, they’ll think you’re protesting. You can’t stand up!'”
So Garner managed to stay put until the commercial break, when she suddenly realized she had to go to the bathroom.
“We go into the bathroom because she’s going to have to hold something up. It’s not pretty, but I just feel like you should know the truth about these things,” Garner told Fallon, who was starting to look a bit embarrassed.
“The connection of the bodysuit, because it had a hook-and-eye situation, was in an intimate position. It was, like, in, my vagine,” she said, while Fallon squirmed!
“I couldn’t reach it, so I said to my friend, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think you’ve got to get this,'” she went on.
“She’s a good friend,” Garner added. “She said, ‘If this has to be done, it has to be done, but listen, I want you to give it a good college try!'”
After that she talked about her movie. Yes this is out of character for her, as was her saccharine reading of “Go The F- to Sleep,” but it’s not unprecedented. On the David Letterman show in 2010 she told a story about how a dolphin once pleasured himself on her foot. 2010 was incidentally the year she almost split with Ben before she had a “band-aid baby.” (Not my words, that was in an US Weekly article I’m assuming was publicist sanctioned.) The Daily Beast points out that this story took up a lot of time she could have been talking about her conscious uncoupling. At least she’s changing the narrative, right?
Garner was on Late Night with Seth Myers last night and she showed photos and talked about her stint in marching band in junior high playing saxophone. She called her saxophone “Sally” and explained how hard and exacting it was. You can see that segment here.
Here’s the clip of Garner on The Late Show talking about her Oscar dress:
photos credit: WENN and FameFlynet
She looks amazing here, very youthful and alive lol. She’s been delivereT from Ben. I thought it was a very old interview .
She couldn’t afford to be “delivered from Ben”, that’s her brand now. That’s probably the reasoning behind the “conscious uncoupling” stunt. This could go on for years.
I dont think she was ever going to talk about Ben to Fallon, come on. I can maybe see a gag segment with Kimmel where they kid about how it was he that caused the split, but Fallon? Anyway, she has a very cute animated face. Dimples for days.
I think Garner actually has a fairly wicked and raunchy sense of humor. Look at some of her early work (Dude, who stole my car) and just different things she’s said…she sounds like she is probably pretty funny.
This. She’s always quite funny on late night shows and not prim and proper at all, and she’s always been like that as far back as I can remember.
I loved the story where Ben really wanted her to come to a party with him, but she hadn’t washed her hair but didn’t want to seem high maintenance, so went ahead and went with him. She met George Clooney for the first time and was lusting after him, back when he was hot, and she realized he was looking at her strangely. She had that smelly, greasy lice medicine in her hair from the kids having lice and then her also. And she said, no wonder we weren’t invited to their wedding, laughing. and just we will pretend we were busy.
See, that story made me sad for her. It’s not high maintenance to say ‘ok, just let me wash this lice treatment out of my hair and we’ll go’. In fact it’s supremely odd not to do that. But for whatever reason she felt that would make her ‘high maintenance’ in Ben’s eyes, so instead she went to a party with stinking lice treatment in her hair.
@Pepper Don’t worry too much about the shampoo story. It’s definitely fake.
a) Lice shampoo looks sort of like regular shampoo once it’s in your hair. There is no way anyone could possibly think they could go out like that, or whose SO wouldn’t comment if they tried. Are we really going to believe that, even if she would just jump up and go, Ben would let her leave like that?
b) it would burn. If she really decided not to wash her hair out after applying the shampoo, the story would be about her scalp feeling like it was on fire, not George thinking she smelt funny.
This is a woman who said her favorite curse word was “rats”
This interview only made me like her more!!!
I agree! I always enjoy her on the talk show circuit. And dayum, she looks great!
Bahhaha I laughed way too hard at you calling it “Dude, who stole my car”
lol, it’s been awhile since I watched it, obviously….
Ha! Now Mother Abnegation of the Foot Problems has an actual Personality??!! will Wonders never cease?!?!
“Mother Abnegation of the Foot Problems ”
Priceless! 🙂
Now I wish she’d cut her hair. It’s Barbie hair. How about a nice long lob?
It’s mostly extensions I would assume. It’s very nice and natural looking, but fake.
I despise trendy anything. Her hair looks great here, fake or not. The only reason i’ve had a long bob for years is because this is how long I can grow it and I can’t maintain any high maintenance blow out thingy.
Jen is always different on late night interviews. She wears cute, tight sexy dresses and is very lively and always has funny stories she tells. And if you watch the interviews on YouTube, guys usually are falling all over her in posts about how pretty she is and to also be blown away by what a great self-deprecating sense of humor she has as a bonus, and how lucky Ben is or now what a fool he is to have let her go, etc.
Ironically, Ben had himself a “cool girl” apparently.
That’s kinda mean – women can have natural behaviour that isn’t falsified to please men, ya know.
It’s from his movie Gone Girl. 😉
Lord, just dump the POS. Batfleck ain’t gonna change.
OMG she slays in the black leather pants and tank. Love it! And her face looks so much like Geena Davis in profile. Wow. I hope she stays on this track.
I think this was totally in character for her. She seems super prepared for interviews and seems to tell these types of stories all the time. She’s very “try hard,” as the kiddies say,
Pardon me, but that Oscar dress she is referring to, that is that matronly black number, right? So she wore a metal corset under that and had to be sewn in? For heaven’s sake, why? As far as I can see her figure (which is lovely, by the way) looks exactly the same in that dress as it does in the black frock she’s wearing at Fallon’s . So unless she’s wearing a corset underneath that one, too, I don’t see the benefit of wearing one under her Oscar dress. Honestly I doubt if she even was (wearing one). Sounds like a made up story to me.
I agree.
It’s made up, because she looks just as lovely and with a waist on the show as she did in that awful, grandma, homely Oscar gown.
And I have heard her go off on a nervous tangent trying to be funny before, so it’s not new.
But try to imagine what this woman has been through.
The perfectly contrived idyllic movie star life imploded worldwide with scandal and embarrassment.
I’m surprised she hasn’t cracked up.
I think she has a great sense of humor and marvelous dimples. Just get rid of the mom clothes, and she’ll be ready for bear. (I don’t really know what my husband means by that saying; it has NOTHING to do with the Revenant!) Team Garner all the way, but it’d be wicked fun to see her in full out revenge glamour…
That was a good friend. I would just have told her to pull it to one side and hope for the best.
She’s always so extra. She’s overcompensating for something… I bet she bawls herself to sleep.
I see it differently. I see her going on late night interviews to entertain those watching, and I always appreciate it when you consider all the awkward interviews you see on those shows or people with no sense of humor trying to be funny and bombing. I will take her being a little over the top any day considering some of the dud interviews I’ve seen on those shows.
Like Casey Affleck’s recent sour appearance on Colbert. Apparently, his marriage was breaking up, but he really came across badly.
I agree, lila fowler. Seeing your posted after I posted upthread.
She’s fronting.
She seems the same in this talk show interview as she has been in other ones. I don’t see a difference. She once talked about meeting George Clooney with that medication for the hair that you use for lice (that’s not a dig, just an example of a story that matches the story she’s telling the clip above in tone). Not something I’d like to admit, but she always has a story that is a bit unusual to tell, and is usually funny in how she delivers it.
I don’t think people usually talk about their divorces on Fallon, Conan, Kimmel, etc.
I like her hair in this clip — the waves are nice. I wish I could do that to my hair.
I know she has always done this, but I just found her incredibly grating and a little “try hard” on the Fallon show. I personally feel like it’s a little glimpse into her controlling nature in the way she speaks to the hosts – almost like she’s lecturing them. Yes, funny, but still lecturing with a little snobbiness and condescension at times (see old Conan interview.) I thought her dress story went on way too long – even Jimmy looked uncomfortable and like he wanted to wrap it up or change the subject at certain points. Other outlets have noted this too. And then she interrupted him when he started to intro. the movie. To me, she comes across as saccharine sweet and nice but very concertedly uses that persona to “kill with kindness” and manipulate situations to get what she wants. And I’ll repeat myself, I do think a lot of this new image (if not all of it) is an effort to show Ben what he’s missing and stay together. My prediction is that they’re using this time to “work on themselves” independently but don’t want to say this publicly or put rings back on, and probably not even tell the kids, in case it doesn’t work out.
I agree. It’s pretty manipulative and sad … like a teenager trying to get attention of the crush who just is not into him/her.
She uses “dude” a lot. How very 2000 of her.
Some of us just can’t let it go, dude.
She’s so annoying on these live tv interviews i usually change the channel half way through because I can’t stand her phony stories about lice or trying to fit into a dress that sound like made up crap she spent hours rehearshing with her publicist.
I gotta say, I like her and this interview made me like her more. The fact that she admits that -gasp! – she doesn’t have a waist in real life and people had to literally deconstruct her to get her into a dress endeared her to me. I know some people think she’s fake, she’s doing all this for publicity, etc., but she’s one of the few Hollywood “stars” I feel like I could be friends with. Or maybe I just really, really liked 13 Going on 30.
Plus, this quote just killed me: “If you stand up, they’ll think you’re Kanye West, they’ll think you’re protesting. You can’t stand up!”
Sigh. I look forward to their movies coming out so they will stop milking their split for every single drop. It will be interesting to see if she can get enough press so she can begin her career in romcoms like Aniston.