Jennifer Garner came close to getting elected for a spot in Aaron Sorkin‘s The West Wing back in the day but when it didn’t work out, the actress set off on a solo trip to the desert to lick her wounds.
“God, I wanted it so badly,” Garner told Emma Grede on a new episode of her Audacy podcast, Aspire, that dropped Tuesday. “I got down and I tested for it, and when I didn’t get it, I had to go to the desert — my first time in Palm Springs by myself — and just sit there for a couple of days.”
Garner called it a “mourning” process after losing the part on such a “good show.” Though she didn’t reveal for which part she auditioned, it was previously reported that she tested for the role of Ainsley Hayes on the NBC drama, a part that eventually went to actress Emily Proctor. Garner had told Flaunt that at the time she had considered it the biggest loss of her career: “I love Aaron Sorkin’s writing. I love words. I love how dense the language and the dialogue [is].”
While she was devastated, a career-making opportunity was just days away from falling in her lap. “Two weeks later, Alias came to me,” Garner told Grede of the J.J. Abrams-created action series that cast her as international spy Sydney Bristow and catapulted her to fame. “Like, what is it? God’s rejection is divine, divine … protection? Rejection is God’s protection. … I’m all for that.”
