LOS ANGELES—It’s unlikely that anyone in the easy come, easy go, paparazzi-encumbered world of high-profile show business will ever be allowed to “have it all” for long. But Jennifer Garner appears to have a better chance than most. Despite having a successful TV show (Alias), a couple of box-office hits (Daredevil and 13 Going on 30), a divorce from one costar (Felicity’s Scott Foley), and a public breakup with another (Alias’s Michael Vartan), she has managed to find ways of creating a profile without being a target. The real miracle is that despite having taken over the role of one half of “Bennifer” from Jennifer Lopez, she is still flying under the gossip radar.

Garner’s marriage to Ben Affleck appears to be going smoothly. Just the fact that no one is really sure if it’s rocky or smooth is probably a triumph for the couple, who had a baby girl a little over a year ago. Not surprisingly, reporters at a media junket at a Los Angeles hotel are as interested in the new family as they are in her role in the Vancouver-shot Catch & Release, which opens Friday (January 26). She won’t say much about her current life but admits that she is doing pretty well.

“I still have those [rough] times in the middle of the night,” she says. “I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, but I really try to exist in the moment and feel how happy I am and just enjoy it. Life is always going to have hard spots and ups and downs, but what is the point if you are in one of those [good places] where you have a balance and happiness and joy if you don’t appreciate it and take advantage of it?”

She went from Alias to Catch & Release and will be in Vancouver again for two weeks next month for a small role in Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman’s film Juno. She also took a role in a movie called The Kingdom, in which her character is called on to go to the Middle East. However, she only went as far as the sands of Arizona because she wanted to stay close to her daughter.

“I have to love something a lot to not be with my little girl,” she says. “I do get out of the house a certain amount, but when I first agreed to do it [The Kingdom] I thought it [leaving her daughter] would be easier. I thought I would be like, ”˜She’s fine; she is happy,’ but I am the one who is a wreck when I’m away from her. We had four teeth coming in at once and that was a rough month, but she’s sleeping well now.”

In Catch & Release she plays Gray Wheeler, a woman whose fiancé dies on the eve of their wedding. Within days of the funeral, she begins to suspect that he had a child with another woman while they were dating. Garner says she read the script while she was working on Alias and assumed the producers would bypass her because of her schedule.

“The writing [by director Susannah Grant] was so beautiful that when she asked me to do it I was beyond excited. When I told them I couldn’t do it for a year, they waited for me, which was so great. I felt that it [the writing] was so real, which is usually not true. You are usually doing a comedy where you are pushing for the ”˜funny’ or a drama where everything is maudlin. But this seemed so true. The character had seen her fiancé as a prince on a white horse, and she only saw the good in him, even when she knew that he wanted to tell her something she didn’t want to hear about. She didn’t want to grow up from her fantasy. She had to learn about the grey in life, which is, not coincidentally, her name.”

There is little grey in Garner’s life, but she admits that she has mixed feelings about fame. She says that when it found her, during the first season of Alias, she wasn’t prepared for it. “Alias came out in September, and in [the previous] July I could go out shopping and no one would say anything. But by December I couldn’t take a step without someone taking a picture. That had never happened to me, so it was a defining moment. I have a strange relationship with it: I know that it is not the best way to live your life but I also feel that there are good things about it. I find it hard to complain about it. Or anything, really.”