ACTION ATTRACTION

Spotlight

On ABC's Alias, Jennifer Garner plays a gorgeously geeky grad student who secretly moonlights as an ass-kicking agent for the renegade intelligence agency SD-6 and as a mole for the C.I.A. In real life, Garner's a traffic-stopping beauty from West Virginia with a straight-A attitude and a hearty appetite for staged combat. In next month's Daredevil, she plays a martial-arts expert whose weapons ° of choice are fork-handled, spinning swords. "I would give myself little drills," she says. "Ten spins with the right, 10 with the left, 10 backwards. It was like learning to play the piano. Then I took them out and pulverized Ben Affleck with them." Garner isn't limited to roles that hinge on handing out beat-downs, however, and in Steven Spielberg's Christmas release, Catch Me if You Can, she plays a different kind of aggressor. "I wouldn't say that she's a full-on hooker with a heart," Garner says, "but she's been known, I think, to weasel cash out of men for a good time." The part involved "a lot of kissing" with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Garner says her husband, the actor Scott Foley, whom she met on the set of Felicity in 1998, understands.

"He is a normal man, and he doesn't relish it by any means," she says, "but he knows who I come home to at night." This summer, the actress will shoot Thirteen Going on Thirty, directed by Gary Winick (Tadpole).

"It's kind of a female version of Big," says Garner, who is 30 herself and whose work schedule for Alias has gone from 80 hours a week the first season to somewhere in the 70s. "And it's a comedy where nobody gets hurt, or is on a wire, and you don't work all night, like, ever," she says with a laugh that lets you know she loves every last grueling, bruising minute of her life as an action hero. —MICHAEL HOGAN