Even the world’s most successful people had to get their foot in the door somehow—billionaire Warren Buffett got his start selling Coke bottles door-to-door. Jeff Bezos once flipped burgers at McDonald’s. And award-winning actress Jennifer Garner, whose organic food brand, Once Upon a Farm, just went public at a $724 million valuation, had a similarly humble start: At a low-paying New York theater, she earned just $150 a week as an understudy.
“I just realized that I liked drama … At the time, I planned a career in the theater; I didn’t even consider film or TV,” Garner told the Independent. “I certainly never expected to be in front of a camera one day of my life.”
Garner said she was “a total snob” and only wanted to do theater—until the paychecks came in and she realized that film paid more. Her first shot at the big leagues was the 1995 television movie Zoya.
“When I moved to New York and was trying to get a job onstage, and was broke and got offered a TV movie,” Garner told the Independent in a 2009 interview, “I was like, ‘Hot dog, put me in front of that camera. Let’s do it!’ And now that it has continued to evolve, I still love my job.”
Yet Garner had to scrape to get by while her career was gaining steam in the 1990s. On top of doing her acting work, Garner even babysat the daughter of late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert. And even when the money started rolling in a bit more, she stayed frugal, spending her first Hollywood paycheck on essentials.
