Jennifer Garner on 51st Birthday Plans & If She’d Do a Cooking Show (Exclusive)

Jennifer Garner is starring in the TV adaptation of Laura Dave’s best-selling novel “The Last Thing She Told Me.”

“Extra’s” Melvin Robert spoke to Jennifer about her 51st birthday plans and the series, which Jennifer went to great lengths to land.

Jennifer is only weeks away from celebrating her birthday. She shared that turning 51 is “a lot less exciting than 50, but I I'm gonna plant trees.”

Garner has been showing off her cooking skills on Instagram. Would she ever turn her “Pretend Cooking Show” videos into an actual series?

She answered, “If I did it all the time… I would start to have to perform it and instead, you’re really just with me as I’m cooking or baking something.”

Joined by Laura, Jennifer also explained why she was drawn to “The Last Thing She Told Me,” which was one of Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Picks.

She shared, “The writing is spare and exacting and just moves… It cuts through butter with a hot knife. And then at the same time, there’s this really human story at the center of it about a woman becoming a parent when she doesn’t expect to become one, and a child who doesn’t expect to have a mother suddenly growing into a world where she does have one.”

Once she heard that Julia Roberts had dropped out of the project, which was adapted and co-created by Laura and Josh Singer, she went on a letter-writing campaign to get the part.

She dished, “I just wrote how I felt and why, you know, why this resonated with me, and it's not something I had done — certainly in recent memory and, or if ever — and I just kind of put it all out there. And luckily for me, I had an advocate in Reese, I had an advocate in Laura and Josh, or advocates in Laura and, Josh and then Lauren Neustadter, our producer. So, I was very lucky to be here.”

Jennifer also discussed how she had to dull some of her own maternal instincts to become her character Hannah.

She commented, “It was as much about erasing so much of myself or dulling parts of myself to make sure that Hannah had room to breathe.”

Garner elaborated, “One of those things was my natural, kind of, energy. One of those things was working with a vocal coach to just deepen my register… Hannah is more, I felt like she has more gravitas as a person. And one of those things was kind of rubbing the edges off of how maternal I am naturally. And I, because I have three kids and because I love teenagers and love kids, having to kind of just pull back on all of that. So there were a lot of ways that I was not like Hannah.”