Jenna and Matty are still living there happily ever after! Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo had the ultimate 13 Going on 30 reunion during his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony on Thursday, February 8, where the 51-year-old actress honored the 56-year-old actor. At the beginning of Jennifer’s speech, she pointed out that she was a last-minute replacement for Laura Dern, who got COVID-19 and couldn’t make it.
While explaining that she was happy to “pinch hit” for Laura in honor of Mark, Jennifer jokingly quipped, “Wait a minute, I know this is the question you are all wondering. So, I’m just gonna cover the elephant in the room — why wasn’t I asked to do this in the first place? I kicked off the Mark Ruffalo rom-com era!”
In response, the Marvel Cinematic Universe actor laughed while the rest of the crowd cheered for Jennifer. The former co-stars then hugged and laughed while she reminisced about their hit comedy that premiered 20 years ago.
Jennifer Garner honors Mark Ruffalo: "To work with you, Mark, is to love you…You allow yourself to be fully known by your colleagues, by the audience, by the world. Your work on 'Poor Things' deserves all of the awards." https://t.co/uJ4gZvVIYN pic.twitter.com/OX3OaB9ll2
— Variety (@Variety) February 8, 2024
After acknowledging that other speakers praised Mark’s activism, personality and talent, the Last Thing He Told Me star added, “Honestly, I don’t know what you would have done without me. Thank god I showed up. I have got to be here to honor and elucidate rom-com Ruffalo.” Jennifer also pointed out how fortunate she and Mark are to have shared the screen in one of the most popular cult classic movies of all time.
“How lucky are we to have been in a movie that kids are still dressing up as for Halloween?” Jennifer asked. “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. I wonder if these esteemed ladies enjoyed Mark’s anxiety as much as I did?”
In a hilarious move, Jennifer dropped a major bombshell: “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 deathly quiet [and] to ‘Bro, this is not for me,’” the Peppermint actress recalled.
Nevertheless, Jennifer complemented Mark’s “depth” in his performances and added, “To work with you, Mark, is to love you.”
“You allow yourself to be fully known by your colleagues, by the audience, by the world,” she concluded “Your work on Poor Things deserves all of the awards, all of them. But the real success is in how thrilled and delighted your colleagues are to have the opportunity to lift you up and celebrate you. Every time your name is called, Hollywood takes a deep collective breath and says, ‘OK, the good and right thing has happened.’”