On a podcast episode released August 25, 2026, “Alias” star Jennifer Garner said the years she spent away from acting to raise her three children came with a bill she hadn’t budgeted for — and it landed all at once when her marriage to actor Ben Affleck ended. The cost, she said, was financial.
Talking with entrepreneur and podcast host Emma Grede on “Aspire with Emma Grede,” Garner pointed to the shape her career was in when the marriage ended. “I panicked when I was first out of my marriage and realized I had taken such a step back in my work,” Garner said on the podcast.
Nobody, she said, could promise her the offers would keep coming. “This isn’t a career that’s like, ‘Hey, you’re 60, you’re 55, you’re 43, come on, let’s pay you more than you’ve ever made,’” she said. Right behind that came a second realization that reshuffled everything: providing for herself and her kids was her job now.
Drawing the Line Around Home
Some terms were fixed, said Garner, who lives in Los Angeles. “I can work in Los Angeles. I can’t leave these kids for six months at a time,” she said. “I would love to. I love going on location, but that is not this time in my career.” Together with Nicole King, her longtime manager at Linden Entertainment, she started looking for ways to keep money coming in without surrendering the hours she wanted at home.
Fame, she said, is no safety net. “It’s not like you can just unfamous yourself. Life is expensive,” Garner said. “Just because you’re well known by people does not mean that there is some great living being provided for you.” She also said: “It became very serious to me really quickly as someone who had never given a lot of thought to money.”
On what the breakup didn’t leave her with, she was just as blunt. “I didn’t get some huge payout, so what is it gonna be?” she said of the split.
Building a Business Away From Set
Jobs within driving distance solved only half the problem. In 2017, Garner joined Once Upon a Farm — a maker of organic food for babies and children founded by Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz — as a co-founder and chief brand officer. The company went public on February 6, 2026, at a valuation of $724 million. She told Grede that the venture was a deliberate way to generate income for her family, alongside acting work close to Los Angeles, where she shares parenting duties with Affleck.
Hearing it from an actor with “Dallas Buyers Club” on her résumé underlines something easy to forget: critical acclaim and a dependable paycheck are separate things, and a career put on hold for caregiving doesn’t resume where it left off. What she described to Grede was panic about predictability, not prestige.
Why She Has No Regrets
Handling her own finances is not a strength, by her own account. “All he has to do is look at me funny, and I convince myself that I am broke,” she said of her business manager, adding that her problem is that she gives a lot of it away.
The trade itself, though, she doesn’t revisit. Taking an occasional job while spending most of her days at home was, as she tells it, sheer luck, and she said she felt grateful for the chance. She got the work and she got the years at home. Complaining about any of it, in hindsight, is something she cannot bring herself to do.
A Marriage That Ended in Public
They married in 2005 and had three children together. They separated in 2015, though the divorce was not finalized until 2018 — three years of unraveling, most of it in view of the paparazzi.
Neither has kept quiet about the ending. Affleck, the “Argo” director, told The New York Times in February 2020 that “the biggest regret of my life is this divorce.” Garner has said the hardest part was watching a family come apart, along with the loss of a genuine partnership and friendship.
Affleck was Garner’s second husband. She married actor Scott Foley in 2000 and divorced him in 2004, one year before she married Affleck. Affleck went on to wed singer/actress Jennifer Lopez, a marriage that ended in a divorce settled in January 2025 and finalized the following month.
The unsentimental tone is what makes her account unusual. Garner frames neither the years at home as a sacrifice nor the scramble afterward as an injustice. She describes a trade she made with open eyes, and a bill that arrived later than she expected — one she chose to cover by building a food company and arranging her filming schedule around school pickups. With that valuation behind her, the math appears to have worked.