The actress adorably roasted her former co-star for trying to drop out of the flick.
Jennifer Garner is playfully roasting her pal. On Thursday, the 51-year-old actress stepped out to honor Mark Ruffalo at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, but made sure to poke fun at her 13 Going on 30 co-star too.
Garner started her speech by sharing that she wasn't actually scheduled to be there, but was rather called in at the last minute to fill in for Ruffalo's We Don't Live Here Anymore co-star, Laura Dern, who's currently battling COVID-19.
That realization left Garner with one question: "Why wasn't I asked to do this in the first place?"
"I kicked off the Mark Ruffalo rom-com era!" she proclaimed of 13 Going on 30, which was released in 2004. Not only that, she said, but "it was bookended 20 years later with [their 2022 Netflix film] The Adam Project."
"I mean, it writes itself," she quipped, before telling the crowd, "Honestly, I don't know what you would've done without me. Thank God I showed up. I have got to be here to honor and elucidate rom-com Ruffalo."
Of her and Ruffalo's beloved rom-com, Garner gushed, "How lucky are we to be in a movie that kids are dressing up for as Halloween, that still means something to people?"
"I wonder if my colleagues -- Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth [Paltrow], Keira Knightley -- I wonder if they would agree that Mark owes this rom-com success to the scruffy hair, the untucked cute button down, both of which became the norm for cute guys everywhere for the next 20 years," she said, naming some of Ruffalo's other co-stars, before joking of them, "I wonder if these esteemed ladies enjoyed Mark's anxiety as much as I did."
"I wonder if he tried to drop out of their films like he did out of ours after the first rehearsal of the 'Thriller' dance, where Mark went from kind of shocked that we actually had to do this, to antsy, to a deathly quiet, to, 'Bro, this is not for me,'" Garner recalled, as Ruffalo laughed while standing beside her.
Garner continued her speech by noting, "There's a through line from beloved Matty in 13 Going on 30 to Duncan in Poor Things. A common thread of anxiety, yes, of clarity of purpose, of understanding of story, of standing up for your characters, being a person of character, showing up for your co-stars, bringing your family with you into every moment of every scene, and showing up with joy."
"To work with you, Mark, is to love you. I don't care what anyone says," she quipped in conclusion. "You allow yourself to be fully known by your colleagues, by the audience, by the world... Congratulations, Mark. We love you."
It's safe to say that the love between Garner and Ruffalo is mutual. When ET spoke to Ruffalo last month, he praised Garner as "just magical," noting that it was their "wonderful chemistry" that prompted him to sign on to 13 Going on 30.
"It was my first kind of studio film. I'd been doing pretty small indies up to that point and Gary Winick, our director, said, 'I want to do a small indie but in a rom-com studio film,'" Ruffalo told ET. "It was Jen Garner, who is just magical. We had just a wonderful chemistry together."
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