Jennifer Garner's Love for On-Screen Combat
In a recent interview, veteran actress Jennifer Garner expressed her enthusiasm for performing intense fight scenes on camera, stating that there's nothing she enjoys more than a good on-screen slugfest. Garner made these remarks while discussing the second season premiere of the Apple TV thriller The Last Thing He Told Me, where she engages in a particularly brutal battle sequence.
A History of Intense On-Screen Battles
Garner revealed that her scene partner for the kitchen fight in The Last Thing He Told Me was none other than Sala Baker, with whom she had previously shared a violent confrontation nearly two decades earlier in the 2007 action thriller The Kingdom. According to Garner, that earlier fight remains the most brutal combat sequence she has ever filmed in her career.
"The last time I fought him was in The Kingdom," Garner told journalists and influencers. "He pulled me out of the ceiling and Pete Berg, who was the director, told him to try to kill me. We did not have a lot of choreography, and he told me to do anything I could to survive."
The Infamous Ear-Biting Incident
Garner recounted how the intense realism of that earlier fight led to a memorable moment: "I ended up scrambling onto his back and I bit his ear. And we have a picture of him missing a chunk of ear because we were not kidding."
When her co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau expressed disbelief at this anecdote, asking "You bit a piece of his ear off?" Garner responded laughingly, "Like Mike Tyson. Don't make me mad. I've warned you before."
Returning to Combat with Familiarity
Garner said that when she discovered she would be fighting Baker again in The Last Thing He Told Me, she "had no fear" about the upcoming sequence. "He just picked me up and threw me around ... It was really great and a lot of fun," she recalled.
The actress described how the crew expressed concern for her safety during filming, but she insisted on maintaining the intensity: "We went for it in a way that the crew were like, 'Can you be careful with her?' I was like, 'No, no, no, no — he's not going to be careful, I'm not going to be careful. Just back out of the way. I have a score to settle here.'"
The Last Thing He Told Me: Continuing the Story
Based on Laura Dave's popular 2021 novel, which was partly inspired by the Enron scandal, The Last Thing He Told Me follows Hannah (played by Garner), a newlywed who teams up with her stepdaughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) to investigate her husband Owen's (Coster-Waldau) sudden disappearance after his company becomes involved in a financial scandal.
The first season concluded with a dramatic cliffhanger, as Hannah made a deal with a mob consigliere that prevented her and Bailey from ever seeing Owen again. However, Owen appeared in the final moments of the season finale, leaving audiences eagerly anticipating the continuation of the story in season two.
Garner's enthusiasm for physical combat scenes adds an authentic intensity to her performance in the thriller series, demonstrating her commitment to bringing realistic action to her roles even two decades after her breakthrough performance as Sydney Bristow on the television series Alias.
