“That’s more badass than I remembered it,” Jennifer Garner declares while watching an action sequence from her 30-year career for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection. As it turns out, there’s a lot for Garner to rediscover from her storied career, starting with her breakout role on the hit spy show Alias and going through to her latest project, The Five-Star Weekend, Peacock’s series adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s bestseller.

“Alias was so far outside of anything I had done. No one had thought of me for action. No one had thought of me for a tough role,” Garner says of her pivotal five-season turn as undercover agent Sydney Bristow from 2001 to 2006. Born from an idea that arose during the writing of J.J. Abrams’s prior show, Felicity, Alias introduced Garner to longtime friend Victor Garber, who played Sydney’s CIA-operative father, Jack. “Anything Victor Garber does is iconic,” Garner tells VF. “I kind of feel like his actual daughter and I feel like he’s a real father figure to me. He married Ben [Affleck] and me [in 2005]. He’s the godfather to one of my kids [Affleck and Garner’s eldest, Violet], and that’s a cherished relationship.”

Garner recently introduced her three children with Affleck to Alias. They’ve seen other performances from their mom, including—to the actor’s embarrassment—the one given in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, a 2002 crime caper in which Garner played a high-end call girl. “I was so girl-next-door,” she recalls. But with her brief yet memorable role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s suave scam artist, Garner was reborn as “a sexual creature” onscreen. During a clip in which she breathily asks DiCaprio’s character to pay her for sexual favors, Garner balks: “As I’m watching it, I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, my son [Samuel] just watched this movie!”

Meanwhile, Garner is eager for audiences old and young to catch Love, Simon, a 2018 coming-of-age film about a gay teenager (played by Nick Robinson) who experiences his first love. One of the movie’s memorable scenes features Simon having a heart-to-heart with his mother, played by Garner, after coming out. “I read that scene and I just was like, Selfishly, I want to be the person to say these lines. I want to help bring this to life, and I want to know what it feels like to say them as a mom. I want to have this practice in case I ever need it,” Garner says. “As a person in the world, I think it’s so important that we meet our kids with this acceptance and love, whatever they bring to you.”