The Chick Who Kicks

By Belinda Luscombe

In the pantheon of lookers with left hooks--a group that stretches from Brunhilde to the Powerpuff Girls--Sydney Bristow belongs in the geeky-but-cute niche. She's the assassin with dimples.

As played by Jennifer Garner on ABC's buzziest new-season show, Alias, Bristow is one of the most winning female-action heroes on TV. Garner's ability to plausibly embody Bristow's many identities--cheerful graduate student, plucky double agent, vulnerable loner and (this part is key) killer clotheshorse--helped the actress become something else last week: a Golden Globe winner. Best-actress laurels don't normally go to ladies who lunge, as one could tell from the look on Garner's face when she accepted the award. What does one do after a surprise like that?

"We were out of there so fast," says Garner, 29. "When we got to the party, people started coming up to me, and I felt, 'I just don't belong here.'" She and husband Scott Foley skipped out and were in their sweats, eating takeout pizza in front of the TV before the awards show had finished airing on the West Coast. "We felt like we had gotten away with something big," she giggles.

Her down-home attitude is one reason Alias is succeeding where so many of its girl-guns-and-gams forebears have tanked. For, at first blush, the Sunday-night show is just a better-produced La Femme Nikita, the USA movie spin-off starring Peta Wilson that developed a cult following but little else.

Bristow is a double agent who works for both the CIA and a mercenary underworld outfit known as SD-6 that she once believed was part of the CIA. Her father, with whom she has had a lifetime of chilly relations, does the same. She is sent in different guises (many involving loud dye jobs and midriff-baring tops) on international missions on which she has to pretend to do what SD-6 wants while really doing what the CIA wants. She also, and invariably, has to overpower a huge gent who's packing heat.

But like Felicity, also spawned by Alias creator J.J. Abrams, the new show features a heroine with romance-challenged friends, an unwanted crush and lots of doubt about a career-exit strategy. "She is very lonely," says Garner. "She's an overachiever who works to the best of her abilities but can't believe she is in a position of not wanting to be a spy anymore." The producers don't saddle her with a stint in special ops to try to explain her combat chops. She's an athletic collegiate who fights because sometimes, in her job, she has to. And she wins, which, after all, is no more preposterous than a millionaire who dresses like a bat to fight crime.

Alias' refusal to make a strong woman seem like an estrogen-deprived freak gives an actress plenty to work with. And Garner delivers. Tall and slim, with flying buttresses for cheekbones and pincushion lips, she is saved from true, distracting beauty by her masculine jaw and long forehead. Garner can be vulgar when Bristow is threatened with anesthesia-free dentistry, vulnerable when she's dealing with her morose CIA handler and horrified when she discovers her fiance murdered in the bath. But mostly Garner spunkily goes about the business of gathering intelligence and trapping bad guys as if spies were just women who are really good at multitasking.

It's so much more than people expected from an actress whose resume highlights were the nurse you didn't notice in Pearl Harbor and a character who didn't make it to the screen in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry. No one seems to find the turnaround more risible than Garner herself. "It's like, let's just go quietly into the corner, absorb it and live with it for a while," she says. Thanking those who cast her in Alias during her Globes speech, she joked, "I know I was great in Dude, Where's My Car? but seriously!"

"That sound bite is a perfect representation of who she is," says Abrams. "Very funny, very grounded. She grew up in a proper West Virginia household and is incredibly well mannered and poised."

The middle daughter of an engineer and an academic, who attributes her poise (and accurate high kicks) to at least a dozen years' ballet training, Garner has Abrams to thank for much. When he cast her in a small role in Felicity, she met Foley, her future husband. Abrams championed Garner for this role as well. As he recalls, "People said, 'She's an interesting choice.' Then there was silence." But he stuck to his instincts. "Most important to me was to create a character who was accessible and emotional, who would then have extraordinary things happen to her," he says. "I felt there was something in Jennifer--that if given the right material, she could run with it."

And run with it she has: through 16-hr. days and doing as many of her own stunts as the producers will allow (she has been taking martial-arts training since her first audition), staying--according to most reports--as cheerfully poised at 5 a.m. as she was at 3 p.m. "There is something profoundly authentic and genuine about Jennifer," says Ken Olin, who directed six of this season's episodes. "As stylized as the show can be, she's not a vamp. She inhabits this role like a nifty girl from West Virginia, which is who she is."

As for the nifty girl in question, not unlike her character, she's ready to work. There is talk of a movie, opposite Ben Affleck, during the summer hiatus. But if not, no matter. "What I'm fine at is fitting in whatever situation I find myself in," she says. "If I'm the fifth lead in a huge movie, I'm happy. If I'm in the foreground, I'm happy saying, 'O.K., this is my job, and I have to do this.'" That's the stuff real spies--and strong actresses--are made of.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles