Garner was born on April 11, 1984, Bakersfield, CA and raised in the suburb of Thousand Oaks. At age 14, she was spotted on the dance floor at an actor friend’s bar mitzvah, where his manager inquired about her own possible interest in acting. At the time, Garner was more consumed by soccer and was hoping to become a professional player, but later decided to sign with the manager. She was soon sent off on a waffle commercial audition and promptly won the job, which would help her segue into several other high profile television spots.
Garner‘s first film job was in a short by artist-video director Mike Mills – “Architecture of Reassurance” (2000), a suburban “Alice in Wonderland” story. The short debuted at the Sundance festival at the start of 2000 and was seen by photographer-turned-film director Larry Clark, who had an eye for spotting interesting looking youths. He was intrigued by Garner’s imperfect smile and picked her to act in a film project of his own. Garner’s work with Mills also came in handy when he cast her to appear in his 2000 music video for “Everything but the Girl” – a track from Temperamental. That year, she was tapped for Gregg Araki’s pilot “This is How the World Ends” a youth-oriented “Twin Peaks”-ish series for MTV, for which she played the character of Christmas, but the ambitious project was deemed to costly for the network to produce.
Following her attempts at series work, Garner went on land her first major bit of exposure on the tent-pole horror series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” playing the gossipy rumor-monger Kirstie in the big 2001 episode “The Body.” Later that year, her project with Larry Clark, the teen drama “Bully” (2001) hit theaters. In the film, Garner played Heather, one of several fed up teens that conspire to kill a teen tormentor in a story loosely based on the real events of a group of Florida teenagers. No stranger to controversy, Clark’s films could always be counted on to generate a wide array of publicity, and Garner was steadily able to find work onscreen, appearing in a pair of episodes of “Grounded for Life” (Fox, 2001-05) in 2001. At the start of 2002, she took up as a teen girl huffing gasoline fumes in the Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle “Love Liza” (2002) and soon after could be seen in another music video – this time, acting in the clip for rap supergroup N.E.R.D.’s single, “Provider.”
At the start of 2004, the actress was back in true-life mean girl territory, playing – much as she had in “Bully” – a teenager guilty of joining up with a peer group’s murderous plot against another teen on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC, 1999- ). At the end of the year, she took flight opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar contender, “The Aviator” (2004), providing a portrait of the would-be teen starlet Faith Domergue, paramour of the troubled Hollywood/aviation mogul Howard Hughes. Almost immediately, the film’s cache turned her from a somewhat-unknown actress to an emerging figure on Hollywood’s radar.
By the time Mike Mills was ready to make his feature debut in 2003, having worked with Garner before, she was a clear choice to co-star in “Thumbsucker,” which hit the festivals early in 2005 and saw its release spread out throughout the year. Once again, as Rebecca, the classmate of a thumbsucking addict, she was ably cast as a beguiling object of affection. Meanwhile, over in the multiplexes, Garner’s role as a cheerleader in the long-shelved Sony Pictures action comedy “Man of the House” (2005) fared less impressively, seeing its tiny release at the start of the year.
Still, Garner maintained a strong presence in the world of independent moviemaking, finding solace in the quasi-reality of “London” (2005), in which she and a mix of on-edge partygoers ended up getting philosophical over a cocaine binge. Late in 2005, she appeared in Green Day’s video for its popular track, “Jesus of Suburbia” and, for a change of pace, decided to try some stage work as well. She went to New York and co-starred in the Off-Broadway play, “Dog Sees God.” She was slated to appear on Broadway in a production of Eric Bogosian’s “SubUrbia” in the fall of 2006, but instead opted to head to the Toronto-based film shoot of “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), a unique story about a young man and his romance with a blow-up doll. Garner also continued to expand upon her fascination with characters in “Normal Adolescent Behavior” (2007), a high school feature drama about a small circle of friends’ tumultuous mixing of sex and friendship.