'Women are softer,' the actress said, while also talking about being raised by conservative, judgment-free parents.
Jennifer Garner kissed a girl -- and, well, she understands the appeal.
"I was like, 'Oh, I get it. Women are softer. No wonder women kiss women,'" the actress revealed in a candid new interview with PrideSource. The realization hit Garner while shooting 2005's supershero Elektra, wherein Norwegian model and actress Natassia Malthe, who plays Elektra's enemy, Typhoid, locks lips with Garner during the "kiss of death." The scene earned the onscreen duo a Best Kiss nomination at the MTV Movie Awards in 2005, but The Notebook took top kissing honors.
"It was a great kiss," Garner gushed, adding that the "very fun"-to-shoot scene created quite the on-set stir with the film's male crew.
"Every man from the studio who I’d never met or heard from or seen before showed up on set to watch that day," she said. "The gay men, the straight men -- they just all suddenly were like, 'Yeah, we just came for a set visit in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia.'"
During the interview, Garner also opened up about many other queer-oriented facets of her career, including a lesbian role in the 1996 HBO film If These Walls Could Talk that she didn't get. But the focus was on her latest role as the mother of a closeted gay son in 20th Century Fox's groundbreaking gay-led love story, Love, Simon, out March 16.
Looking back on her formative years growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, Garner said the LGBT community was a big part of her youth, even though she was raised by old-fashioned parents.
"My parents were conservative in that they didn’t curse, they didn’t drink," she said. "We weren’t allowed to pierce our ears, we weren’t allowed to wear makeup, but they had zero judgment on the way anyone lived their lives. I did not grow up in a house that had an ounce of judgment about other people. There was a gay minister at my family’s church, which, in West Virginia, looking back, I think, 'Oh!'"
Long before catapulting to stardom with films such as Pearl Harbor and 13 Going on 30, Garner recalled performing in community theater productions surrounded by gay men, including a local drag queen named Ted Brightwell (stage name: Viki Williams), who did Garner's hair for every play.
In high school, her "closest friends" were a trio of older gay men who "I would go and hang out with … when I was a peanut. So, it was always totally normal."
Now, her three children with ex-husband Ben Affleck -- Violet, 12; Seraphina Rose, 9; and Samuel, 6 -- are also being raised in an open-minded environment.
"At this point, my kids are young enough that I’m just trying to show them by modeling it for them and keeping open lines of communication," she said. "My kids are growing up saying, 'I don’t know if I’ll someday marry a man, a woman. I don’t know.' Everything is open… . The kind of gender-normative thing is not celebrated and expected in the way that it used to be."
Read the full PrideSource interview here.
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