Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo adorably starred in 13 Going on 30, which has turned into a cult classic, but Garner revealed Ruffalo almost dropped out of the film.
Ruffalo has just been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and his previous co-star was there to support him. Garner joked at the beginning of her speech that she wasn’t supposed to be there, but she was a stand-in for Ruffalo’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore co-star, Laura Dern, who has COVID-19. “Why wasn’t I asked to do this in the first place?” Garner asked.
During her speech, she continued to roast Mark Ruffalo for almost dropping out of 13 Going on 30. “I kicked off the Mark Ruffalo rom-com era!” she said of 13 Going on 30, which was released in 2004. Garner continued that their relationship “was bookended 20 years later with [their 2022 Netflix film] The Adam Project.“
“I mean, it writes itself,” she quipped, “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. How lucky are we to be in a movie that kids are dressing up for as Halloween, that still means something to people?”
Garner continued, “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, before joking of them, “I wonder if these esteemed ladies enjoyed Mark’s anxiety as much as I did.“
Ruffalo co-starred with Witherspoon in 2005’s Just Like Heaven, with Aniston in 2005’s Rumor Has It, with Knightley in 2013’s Begin Again, and with Paltrow in 2013’s Thanks for Sharing. However, he co-starred with Paltrow in several Marvel films, where Paltrow played Pepper Potts, and Ruffalo played Hulk/ Bruce Banner.
“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.
The actress couldn’t fail to note Ruffalo’s recent film, the critically acclaimed Poor Things, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role. “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.”
