Considering there is not a single picture to prove that Jennifer Garner has aged since her days on Alias, it's hard to believe the action-, romance- and wig-packed ABC spy drama premiered 20 years ago.
But it indeed has been that long since Garner assumed the role of Sydney Bristow, mild-mannered grad student by day and slick undercover agent always, whose attempt at a so-called normal life immediately spins out of control when her boss at what turns out to be a branch of an international crime syndicate finds out she told her fiancé she's in the CIA. Which, she thought she was. Sydney's mom had died (mysteriously, it turns out) and Victor Garber played her dad, who was only holding her at arm's length for so long because he too was a double agent. Surprise!
"It is a ludicrous premise," series creator J.J. Abrams quipped to E! News in 2001 not long after the show's Sept. 30 premiere.
But with every episode a roller-coaster ride turning what you thought you knew about a character on its head, that coveted 18-to-49 demographic kept coming back for more.
Asked about the show's success that December, Garner guilelessly replied, "Is it successful? I guess I'm unaware of some huge success. As long as we're on the air, I'm happy, and I know people are liking it, I know people are watching it, but I have tried not to pay too much attention to all of that, because you can get so wrapped up in it."
Garber, a prolific stage and screen actor whose credits included Titanic and Legally Blonde, got recognized far more than she did at first, the actress shared with a smile, but soon enough there weren't many places she could go where people didn't notice that there was a super-spy in their midst.
For more on how the pieces of the intricate puzzle that was Alias came together, here are 20 secrets about how Garner ended up in the breakout role of a triple-lifetime and what happened next. (There are major plot spoilers ahead, so if you were waiting until now to binge Alias, it's streaming on Amazon Video and come back for a debriefing when you're done.)
The inspiration for the character of Sydney Bristow? Jennifer Garner.
Alias creator J.J. Abrams had first encountered the actress, whose biggest gigs to date included playing Jennifer Love Hewitt's roommate on the short-lived Time of Your Life, when she guest-starred on Felicity, which Abrams co-created with Matt Reeves.
"There was this promise about her," Abrams told E! News in October 2001, "like this light. There was a spark, and I just thought giving her the opportunity to do something that was sort of bold and out there and kickass and fun would just be exciting to see, because I just thought that she had that."
Considering she had to audition five times before she was cast as Hannah for one episode of Felicity (the character made two subsequent appearances), color Garner surprised. She recalled to USA Today in 2002, "I asked, 'What did you see me in that made you think I could do this. Mr. Magoo? Dude, Where's My Car?'"
Admittedly, Abrams told TV Line for an Alias oral history in 2016, when he wrote the pilot he "was trying not to think of Jen because I wanted Sydney to be her own thing that then Jen could bring to life, or whomever. But there was no one else I really considered but her."
Not that Garner was automatically recruited for the top job. There was still an audition process and Jenna Fischer of future Pam fame on The Office was also in the running to dash about in stilettos.
"You know, I auditioned for the role of Sidney Bristow on Alias and I got really far," Fischer shared with former co-star Angela Kinsey on a September 2020 episode of their Office Ladies podcast while they rehashed the episode in which Dwight admits the only stripper he's ever encountered was one of Sydney's alter egos.
"So I went in and I read for the role," Fischer recalled, "and my scene that I had to audition with was this really emotional, dramatic scene where I'm crying… I think, like about my mother. And it was super intense. And the feedback that my agent got was like, 'Jenna blew us away. We absolutely loved it. Her scene was, she just did a great job. We're gonna pass on her because we just, unfortunately, don't think she's hot enough.' That was my feedback."
Cue a look of well-contained exasperation from Jim Halpert.
Garner was watching Traffic, phone in hand waiting for the call, when she found out she had booked the pilot.
"I don't think there'd been anything that I ever wanted this badly or worked so hard to get," she told TV Line. "So I was in the middle of the movie, and my phone started to ring and I dodged outside. It was finally, finally mine and I just remember watching the rest of Traffic like it was a romantic comedy. I was kind of levitating above the rest of the seats in the theater. And so freaked out."
Abrams still had to fight to cast Garner because, as executive producer Jeff Pinkner remembered, "ABC at the time was not interested" due to her lack of meaty prior experience. Garner recalled, "The great thing about J.J. is that he pulls you into a fight like that. I was his team member in it… I had an idea at least of what I was up against." Added Pinkner, "I think she blew everyone away with her dedication."
When shooting first got underway, there was a little bit of panic on both Abrams' and Garner's part that she might not be able to pull it off. "So we had this meeting," Abrams told E! News, "and we just talked about the character in a way we hadn't since the beginning, and we really just went through it, and it was like we just realized we had to jump in 100 percent and do it in a way that was really committed to it." He added, "And she was, from that moment on, beyond any expectations, she was incredible."
Garner was also "game to do anything," Abrams said appreciatively. "Like if there's some ridiculous 60-foot wire rig thing, she's like, 'I want to do it!'…She's like, 'I got my own harness!' She's nuts."
Count everyone, from Garner to Victor Garber, who played Sydney's enigmatic father and fellow agent Jack Bristow, pleasantly shocked to have secured a role on Alias. "I was convinced that the guy who went in ahead of me was going to get the part, because he looked exactly like I thought that Jack Bristow should look," Garber recalled to TV Line. "I said, 'Why am I here? This guy is perfect…' I was stunned to get it, frankly. Very happy."
Michael Vartan, who played Vaughn (or did he…?), said that both he and Bradley Cooper, who was cast as Sydney's conflicted (and not just because of the frosted tips) journalist pal Will Tippin, thought they'd blown their audition. In fact, Vartan did flub his first read ("I was sweating profusely"), but a second try went better. "It's funny, because after we read, Bradley and I were just hanging out outside," the actor recalled. "We looked at each other and we were like, 'Dude, we're not both getting this part."…Lo and behold, we both got the job."
Surprisingly, Vartan didn't have to do a screen test with Garner first, but, he added, "I challenge a paper bag to not have chemistry with Jennifer Garner." (So, let's just say, she'd never been kissed by Vartan until the script called for it.)
The exterior shots of Sydney-as-ordinary-graduate-student were filmed on the UCLA campus. Adorable, doomed Danny (Edward Atterton) proposes to her in the pilot in Dickson Court and Will is first spied running laps with Sydney and looking horribly bummed when she tells him she's engaged at Marshall Field.
Sydney's sexier ensembles took some getting used to for Garner, who claimed she hadn't even put on a two-piece bathing suit before the show.
"I've never worn a bikini in my life," the West Virginia native told USA Today. "My dad didn't like them…So, of course, when [costume designer Laura Goldsmith] first came to me with the rubber dress or the lace dress with only the bra underneath, my initial reaction was, 'Absolutely not.' But she very calmly shows me how she's gonna do this, and she's gonna cover that, and the next thing you know, I'm in a bikini."
Yes, working on Alias' costumes, hair and makeup was as fun—and intense—as it looked.
Two-time Emmy nominee Laura Goldsmith didn't work on the pilot but she came onboard right after and, one day during a fitting, she recalled to TV Line in 2016, Garner "put this dress on and she's like, 'I love this dress! I just love it.' And I'm like, 'That's good. But you know, you have it on backwards.'"
"She never pretended to be like, ‘I know everything about wardrobe, and I'm going to put this with that and that with that,'" Goldsmith added. "She was so charming like that."
Noted head hairstylist Michael Reitz, who racked up five Emmy nominations for those eye-catching 'dos, "It was almost a once-in-a-lifetime gig, because it was really about the hair, the clothes, the makeup and the stunts, you know? Jen's main team, we were all very close. We worked 80-hour weeks together."
With Sydney's colorful array of wigs costing roughly $20,000 apiece, Reitz estimated, they tried to get a few uses out of each one by cutting and reshaping the longer styles.
Goldsmith zhuzhed up sneakers and nude character shoes (low-heeled, innocuous shoes designed specifically not to distract from an outfit) to look like badass footwear so that Garner and her stunt double could run, jump and fight more comfortably.
Obviously Garner followed quite the regimen to stay in fighting shape throughout her five years on Alias, courtesy of celeb trainer Valerie Waters, who simultaneously prepared her for 2005's Elektra, which Garner shot during a hiatus from her show. Needing to be in hair and makeup by 5:30 a.m., she'd wake up at 4 a.m. for a 60-minute full-body workout, warm-up to cool-down.
"Do you think that she really wants to get up at 4 in the morning? No," Waters told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. "It's just as hard for her to get up after a few hours sleep as it is for everyone else…You still have to not eat the cookies; you still have to not have that glass of wine."
But Garner was pragmatic about fitness from the beginning, telling E! News in December 2001 about the demands of playing Sydney, "I love it, because it forces me to take care of myself physically. And normally working hours like this you would really let that fall to the wayside. Not that I'm great about it, but pretty much, you know, I have a fight right now and so this morning I got up at 4 to run for half an hour. It just keeps you honest with it, because you have to be warmed up and you have to be in good shape, or you'll get hurt."
Even Sydney's smooth, confident stride took practice, with Waters helping her straighten her walk while strengthening pretty much every muscle in her body. "She's worked on me," Garner explained to USA Today in 2002. "In real life, I have kind of a ducky walk. That's just me trying to be as kick-ass as this chick deserves to be."
She also studied with taekwondo grandmaster Byong Yu, and has been a fan of kickboxing workouts ever since.
"Her work ethic is just incredible," Waters, who's been Garner's go-to trainer for the better part of 20 years now, told InStyle in 2014.
Garner worked her tail off, but stunt double Shauna Duggins was there to make the action look effortless—and in 2005 became stunt coordinator for the whole production, earning an Emmy nomination in the process. In the book Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story, Duggins recalls pulling off the precarious lifting of a whole Jaguar—with Garner behind the wheel and Rachel Nichols crawling out of the trunk—in the season five episode "Reprisal." Sydney sticks a magnet to the crane and they escape through the sunroof as the car crashes to the ground. "That's the look they wanted," Duggins explained. "A brand-new Jag falls 200 feet to the concrete, leaving the girls dangling from a cable."
To achieve just that, Duggins wanted to cut the roof off the car to ensure the actresses' safety. But, she said, the director wanted a view from the top of the car showing Sydney and hacker Rachel Gibson emerging from the sun roof. So, "for the shot of the girls hanging from the cable," Duggins detailed, "we ratcheted them off the roof of the car and tipped the camera. It looked just like the car fell away from the actresses, who, for close-ups, were hanging about 50 feet on a stage in front of a green screen. After, in post-production, they were hanging against a background of shipping cranes."
Meanwhile, Duggins and Nichols' double, Stacey Carino, did spend some time dangling 200 feet in the air for the long shots.
Alias was a reunion of sorts for Garner and Ron Rifkin, who played Sloane, the cold-blooded boss of SD-6. Her first job in New York after moving there to try her hand at acting, following her graduation from Denison College in Ohio, was understudying a Broadway play called A Month in the Country—starring Rifkin and Helen Mirren (whom Garner later worked with in Arthur).
Onscreen father-daughter subterfuge aside, in real life Garner and Garber became dear friends.
"One of the best things about that show specifically was that I was surrounded by these actors whom I revered," Garner told TV Line. "I mean, when I lived in New York in my early 20s, I saw four different shows starring Victor Garber. And not only did I see them, I stood in the back and paid Standing Room Only ticket prices, because I couldn't afford to sit down. So for me, working with Victor was the highlight of anything that I'd done so far."
"People talk like suddenly I'm action chick," Garner told USA Today in 2002. "The hard stuff is the acting. It's like I do an emotional Olympics every week."
True story: In the course of leading Sydney's triple life, not even including the multiple characters the secret agent assumed weekly for her assignments, her tear ducts were firing on all cylinders from day one as she got engaged to her doctor boyfriend of two years and then buried him over the course of a half-hour. She was rewarded for her efforts right out of the gate with a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2002, and in 2005 her fellow thespians helped bookend her journey with a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series.
Garner was also nominated for an Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama Series four years in a row, and Garber was nominated three times for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, but ultimately Alias' four Emmy wins (out of 36 total nominations) were for art direction, cinematography, stunt coordination and makeup.
Greg Grunberg, who played Agent Eric Weiss and is a fixture of Abrams' small- and big-screen worlds, from Felicity to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, bought the 1969 Ford Bronco that Will drove on the show. "I still have that car," he told TV Line in 2016. "It's in my garage right now."
Producers did consider digitally attaching Garner's head to an unexpectant woman's body when the actress got pregnant with her first child, but ultimately they wrote the real-life blessed event into Sydney and Vaughn's tumultuous arc for the show's fifth and final season.
"When you're pregnant, you're not as anonymous," supervising producer Alison Schapker told The New York Times in October 2005. "For Syd, it will be a sharp contrast with how she usually moves in the world," with even a super-spy unable to avoid having "strangers ask when she's due and want to touch the baby." At the end of the day, Schapker said, Sydney (and Garner, for that matter) was just another woman "working through her pregnancy."
Asked about including her baby bump in the storyline, Garner told TV Line in 2016, "They were all so kind to me about it. They were so nice. But then you can't do the fights and it's a different animal. It wasn't the same thing."
Vartan did not know if Vaughn would be back for season five after the heart-stopping car wreck that punctuated his "my name is not Michael Vaughn" confession at the end of season four—nor did he know Sydney's CIA handler-turned-soulmate wasn't gone for good when he was gunned down at the beginning of season five shortly after finding out he was going to be a father.
"I didn't know I was coming back at the time," Vartan recalled to TV Line in 2016, referring to the crash. "I didn't even know that my death was going to be faked for a while, to be honest with you. I don't know if J.J. withheld that information on purpose. If he did, that was very shrewd and clever of him."
(Considering the way Abrams protected the secrets of the Star Wars universe in later years, we'd go with shrewd and clever.)
Not that being out of the loop was unusual. Garner told E! News in 2001 that she never knew what was coming down the pipeline more than one week at a time.
When Quentin Tarantino guest-starred as a villainous former SD-6 agent (turns out the nefarious outfit didn't have a lot of satisfied ex-employees) for "The Box," a cliffhanger two-episode storyline, she didn't even know what would happen in the second half before that week of shooting.
"They won't tell me anything," she said with a smile. "Every once in awhile there will be the tiniest tidbit of something in the future and we kind of all hoard what we know."
There was always an explanation for everything—hallucinogenic drugs, dream sequences, clones, etc.—but the actors were all a little skeeved out when the show veered into the supernatural.
"And I thought, why am I a vampire? Where has the mythology taken us? How have we come to this?" Garner recalled to TV Line with a laugh.
Added Vartan, "Victor and I joked about it…There was a scene where we jump over a Russian city, and there's a huge red ball hovering over us. We looked at each other and said, "Dude, we didn't jump the red ball. We just jumped the shark."
Garber said, "But then what happened was, the show, like most shows, it goes in peaks and valleys, and it came back strongly."
Judging by the way Garner throws herself into her domestic to-do list, whether she's baking cookies, planning game night with her kids or celebrating Reese Witherspoon's birthday, there is nothing surprising about the notion of her being Alias' head cheerleader heading into the home stretch in 2005.
"Typically by the fifth season of a show, No. 1 on the call sheet is the last one to show up and the first one to leave," executive producer Pinkner explained to TV Line. "But Jennifer instituted a Crew Member of the Week award and created a little crown, which went from crew member to crew member each week, and there was a ceremony. There was one particular AD [Richard Coad] who everyone loved, and when it was finally his time—he was from Hawaii—she had rented hula dancers and everybody marched en masse to a soundstage, the doors opened and the hula dancers came out on a float… all of which she paid for out of her own pocket."
It still delights the heart to think about George Clooney returning to ER for Julianna Margulies' final episode years after Dr. Doug Ross had left the building. Right up there with those warm fuzzies is Bradley Cooper's readiness to bring Will back into the fold for Alias' 100th episode.
"It became clear as we started talking about it that it wouldn't really feel complete unless Bradley/Will was in it," Pinkner remembered. "We reached out to him and asked him to come. He had a big life and a big career at that point, and he very graciously and happily came back to do the episode."
In these reboot-happy times, the subject of getting the team back together (whoever survived the first go-round, that is) for more Alias has come up quite a bit in recent years. Asked about the prospect once again in March, Garner told The Hollywood Reporter, "Sign me up! Grab Bradley by the scruff of his neck!"
Whether Bradley Cooper would need that sort of wrangling or not, the main cast does still enjoy the bond that was fostered early on when they were having weekly watch parties at each other's houses.
"We liked being with each other," Garber, who officiated at Garner's 2005 wedding to Ben Affleck, told TV Line in 2016. "It was just one of those things that doesn't happen. It hasn't happened to me before or since."
Added Michael Vartan, "I've been in this business for 30 years. It was, hands down, the greatest human experience I've had in the business by far."