It's a New York morning in Los Angeles. After three solid days of rain, the city is so cold and gray you can almost see the Statue of Liberty rising out of the mist. But duck into the old Orpheum Theater, past the security guards and gaffers, and you're in a London symphony hall--and intrigue is afoot. Onstage, a string quartet plays Bach as Jennifer Garner snakes her hand into the tuxedo jacket of the concertgoer dozing in front of her. The man doesn't notice the intrusion, the hand escaping with his ID card. You do, though, watching from across the theater, and you think to yourself, So those are the hands that pick the pockets that hold the keys that open the locks that lock the doors that guard the secrets that threaten our sleepy world.

* * *

They are large hands: not mannish but sizable in a way that befits Garner's rangy frame. For two years, they've been an integral part of the globe-hopping chopsocky that drives ABC's cult spy-games hit, Alias. To Garner's alter ego, secret agent Sydney Bristow, they're more valuable than all the radio - scrambling cigarette lighters and sonic-wave-activating pens a girl could snug in her Natasha Fatale catsuit. They've hacked and cracked, made bad-guy pie from Taipei to Tunisia, been cuffed and bound more often than Bettie Page. In the movie Daredevil, the season's lone action blockbuster, they wield twin sais, threepronged Japanese fighting swords. Let's just say they're the hands of a certified badass.

But free them from their duty protecting mankind and they flit around a coffee cup, tuck tufts of hair behind her cars. If Agent Bristow is a whirlwind bondage fantasy of wigs and latex minidresses, Jennifer is a Lands' End ad: jeans, black turtleneck, straight brown hair parted down the middle. No makeup, no earrings. Volvo sedan, seat belt on. Oatmeal and egg whites.

Meeting her for brunch is a lot like meeting Cinderella for a drink at a quarter past midnight. She's pretty, with her well-deep dimples and slightly chipmunkish smile--Ben Affleck calls her "the girl next door, the kind of girl your kid brother tries to spy on while she's changing clothes"--but she's less radiant, having doffed the jaw-first sexuality that defines so much of her onscreen presence. She's not running hellbent down a hallway to avoid an exploding whatever-it-is-this-week; she's walking to your table, and her carriage is almost timid. The smile that creases her lovely lips is all the more disarming for its stealth. "I have a big face," she says after taking her seat. "Features on my face are big." She talks like this often, enthusiastically, so you can hear the italics. She also says gosh, which goes to show that you can take the girl out of West Virginia, pour her into a studded choker and a patent leather bra, but you can't take the West Virginia out of the girl.

On TV Garner plays a graduate student who was recruited by secret government agency SD-6--which turns out to be not a secret government agency at all but a splinter group bent on destroying the CIA (Kafkaesque betrayal!). As Agent Bristow, she soon learns that her father is not the salesman she believed him to be but a fellow SD-6 operative working as a mole for the CIA (Freudian family issues!). Garner becomes a double agent, too, falling in love with her CIA handler (Nabokovian taboo!), solving a half-dozen twisted subplots and racing the globe to recover pieces of a lost Italian manuscript that contains the instructions for building some kind of doomsday device (Crichtonian high concept!). Think Bond with feeling. Dostoyevsky with smart bombs. Either way, the tautly paced narrative manages to balance genuine emotion with PVC eye candy.

As a result, Alias is one of those shows that engender devotion out of proportion to their ratings. It opened the second season at a dismal thirty-fifth and often dips into the seventies (it airs on Sunday nights, opposite wildly popular hits such as Malcolm in the Middle and The Sopranos), but the people who watch it trade videotapes and clog Internet bandwidth buzzing about it. ABC stands by the show, periodically airing clip-based episodes to bring new viewers up to speed. What saves the program, unlike smart casualties like SportsNight and Once and Again, is its star.

Garner has taken a role built on illusion--a secret life that slowly subverts her character's "real" life--and filled that role with warmth and breath. Give Charlie's Angels souls and Ph.D.'s, make La Femme Nikita a child of divorce, and you have Sydney Bristow: She can shimmy into an embassy gala in a dress that makes a steam whistle burst from your skull, then let her face register pain with such vulnerability you want to take her home and warm her some milk. She's a sex kitten, a tomboy, a stone killer, but sit her down somewhere quiet and she's astonished at her success. "Sydney's changing who I am in a lot of ways," Garner admits. "I've never been danger seeking. I can't imagine anything I want to do less than mountain biking. I can't even watch Fear Factor--I just don't get it; I don't get the need for that adrenaline rush."

* * *

She grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, which is not as small as, say, Big Ugly, sixty miles away, but small enough that its prodigal daughters are remembered at the local bookstore. (When Garner calls to order a present for her best friend's bridal shower, she has a wonderful conversation with Cheryl, who is working that day.) Ballet and music lessons gave her a taste for the spotlight. After high school, she left for Ohio's Denison College with the idea that she could learn a professiondoctor, maybe-and indulge her appetite by dabbling in the performing arts. Before orientation ended, though, she had changed course. "While other people were buying books, I was down in the drama department auditioning," she says. "Then I couldn't get enough. If I wasn't in a production, I had to be doing something for the dance department or I had to be singing." She spent summers in theaters from Michigan to Connecticut, earning just enough to shack up with raccoons and rats. She loved every minute of it.

Loved it, of course, because it was temporary. But look back through her life and you'll find a thread of adventure running alongside the general-store upbringing, thick and dark as the Tug Fork River. Her willingness to sacrifice comfort for passion had its start not in summer stock but in the very home that created her. She is the daughter of a chemical engineer who left Texas for points cast when Dow and Carbide, lured by the twin sirens of cheap land and lax pollution regulation, flooded the area with money. Her mother was an Okie in the true Joadian tradition. One of nine children, she pored over the neighbor's Life magazines to escape a two-room house.

The Garners augmented their three daughters' education with "experiences." They spent two weeks every summer aboard a twenty-three-foot sailboat. That's five people, twenty-three feet, fourteen days, ninety-plus degrees, sharing a bucket after Daddy accidentally tossed the head overboard. When Jennifer was still a wee lass, the family flew off to Paris, where her father had booked lodging in a cheap hotel. Said hotel happened to be located in one of the more... redly lit parts of town. The next morning, a prostitute came down to breakfast in a bathrobe that malfunctioned. A breast fell majestically onto her table. The cheap hotel lost five guests.

Years later at Denison, things were markedly less scandalous. No beer bongs, no Girls Gone Wild, just theater. There were opportunities for mischief, sure, but to a girl whose worst adolescent offense was driving her dad's Camry to Taco Bell without permission, they weren't especially enticing. "The school was great," she says, "but at the time it was too social, and I was a little overwhelmed. I mean, I was the rebellious one in my family, and I got drunk once in high school, threw up on the driveway and never did it again. I didn't drink like those people drank. It made me nervous. I wish I had loosened up; I wasn't a priss in every area, but I was definitely a priss in that way."

Now, at 30, Jennifer is embarrassed by her tendency to be, as she puts it, a Pollyanna. She still can't tell a dirty joke, just can't. She can, however, relay with glee how the makeup crew on Alias likes to torment her with the names of atrocious sexual maneuvers: the Dirty Sanchez, the Rusty Trombone. "Oh, they make me incredibly happy," she says, eyes alight. "I never remember them, so they can repeat them and I'm just as thrilled. I tried to jump into the fray the other day, and I turned so beet red I couldn't finish."

Her inclination to fluster is irresistibly charming. At last year's Golden Globe Awards, Garner endeared herself to a whole new audience during her unguardedly bubbly acceptance speech for Best Actress in a Television Drama. "I'm really glad I had the first glass of wine, but I'm kind of regretting the second," she said with her down-home grace, and the audience laughed in a way that said, Wow, is she nice

Up to that point, Garner was unknown outside the trade-paper circle, her career the sum of those parts that get written on a resume in pencil. She was That Other Nurse Who Didn't Die in Pearl Harbor, she was the Tall Girlfriend in Dude, Where's My Car? She did TV movies, Law & Order, a couple of Fox shows that sputtered out with the fading twentysomething-drama trend. But along came J. J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, who offered her a recurring guest role as Noel Crane's girlfriend. Impressed by her performance, J. J. developed a show (based on the age-old question "What if Felicity were a spy?") and pushed his young protege past the network's doubting Thomases. By the time of the Golden Globes, a mere four months later, Alias had scissors-kicked its way into a lode of critical acclaim. When the postceremony interviews hit on Daredevil, the buzz about Garner only grew.

* * *

"She can be this incredible physical specimen, says Mark Steven Johnson, who directed her in Daredevil. "But you want to take care of her. She's so strong, so confident and powerful, and yet a moment later you catch that glance and it just breaks your heart." Her capacity for quick emotional downshift isn't confined to the screen. When she is apprised of a remark by one of her Denison professors--something to the effect that she wasn't the most talented but she was an extremely hard worker--her face doesn't react much: a slight knitting of the brow, a tightening of the lips. But her eyes reflect a genuine hurt, and some fraternal urge to protect stirs inside you: the desire to bandage the tough girl's scraped knee.

Therein lies what makes her the ideal choice for Daredevil. The venerable Marvel Comics title had been kicking around Hollywood for years but finally got spurred to development in 2000 by the success of X-Men. Johnson, who'd been reading Daredevil since he was 10, says, "I'd been in my bubble so long writing the screenplay that I really didn't know what was going on in the world. A friend said, 'Have you seen this show Alias? There's this girl who's absolutely amazing.' So I watched the show and I was completely taken by her. We brought her in and I got to meet her. When she left, we all just looked at each other and said, 'Yeah.' "

Alias's first season wrapped in L.A. on a Thursday. Jennifer was on the Daredevil set on Friday morning. Keep in mind: This isn't like going from a sitcom to a romantic comedy, with daytime shooting and weekends free. This is going from six sixteen-hour days a week to an action movie with wire work, advanced martial arts and--worst of all--another crushing schedule. The Matrix cast had six weeks of fight rehearsals prior to filming their sequels; for Daredevil Jennifer had to study the sais with an Olympics trainer on her Alias lunch breaks. On her lone day off each week, she'd stand in her backyard, twirling the swords like her majorette sister once did the baton: ten left, ten right, forehand, backhand, pancake, figure eight. "My feet were covered in bruises," she says. "My shoulders were covered with tiny cuts. It made the crew very nervous."

By the time Daredevil roared to life, Jennifer was Elektra. "Physically, she's not the perfect match for the comic-book Elektra, who has long black hair and is Greek," says Johnson, "but we all know from Alias that Jennifer is a great chameleon. Frank Miller [who rejuvenated the comic in the '80s and created Elektra] visited the set; at first I thought he might be skeptical, because Elektra's like his daughter. But he met Jennifer, watched her and said, 'Oh, my God, she's perfect. Look at her eyes. Her eyes are everything.'"

Minor adjustments completed the transformation (wilder hair, green contact lenses, a noticeable tan), but from a less tangible perspective it's unnerving the way Jennifer taps into whatever it is that obliterates that good-girl aura. Alias has its "Hotcha! " moments, and plenty of 'em, but they're always for show. Sydney the student is a strong superego; only when she's undercover does her id get a chance to play. Elektra, on the other hand, is a predator, all id--carnally as well as pugilistically. If Sydney is Jennifer with the lid off, Elektra is Sydney on crystal meth and a good hit of ecstasy. "While I think Sydney's a sexual being," says Garner, "she's a businesswoman, so she uses what she needs to get by. Elektra wears her sex on her sleeve. It's like, 'OK, I'm incredible looking...but look at me for too long and I'll lop your balls off '"

It's interesting to hear Garner talk about herself. When the topic is real-life experience, she's just Jennifer: the Jennifer who ran down Broadway calling her mother from every pay phone when she got her first professional gig, the Jennifer who can't keep from smiling when she describes what it was like to work with Steven Spielberg for her small part as a call girl in December's Catch Me If You Can. But when the conversation shifts to her performances, she speaks exclusively in the third person, and much of the animation that peppers her speech fades away. It's clear that when she acts, she inhabits her characters. Not in the Method sense, not Brando showy, but in an all-consuming, empathic way. Like Sydney, like Elektra, Jennifer lives in two worlds.

For one scene in Daredevil, Elektra had to jump from one rooftop to another-eight stories above the street--a stunt beyond Jennifer's ability for the simple reason that if she screwed up she would, well, die. No air mattress was waiting just out of camera range. No stroke of digital simulacrum. In the interest of everybody involved, Jennifer was told to run to the edge of the building and act as if she were about to jump-at which point a person who specializes in this sort of thing would be called in to complete the action. After a few takes, it was clear that Jennifer was giving way to Elektra. And out of nowhere, Johnson up and violated Action-Movie Commandment Number One: Thou shalt not endanger thy female lead.

"Hey, Jennifer," he said- "You wanna try it?"

"Yeah!"

She grabbed the sais, ran and leapt. Up and over. Again and again. Until the producer saw her, considered the risk, and blew a gasket.

"Honestly," said Johnson later, "Jennifer doesn't think of herself doing these things-she thinks of her character doing them. When she puts on the leather and takes the sais, she's Elektra. Elektra would do all those things. And Sydney would do those things. Jennifer would not." Then again, this is the woman who showed up on the set covered in nicks and bruises, brandishing them like badges of honor.

Strange thing about adrenaline: When it kicks in, all bets are off And truthfully, nobody knows that better than Garner. Since Alias started shooting in 2001, she has worked nonstop. For a relative newlywed-she married Felicity's Scott Foley (a.k.a. Noel Crane) in 2000 (yes, she owes a lot to J. J. Abrams)-the hours can be grueling. "It's hard for me to relax, because I'm so revved up right now," she says. "I'll go a month easily without a day off, and then I'll get half of one day and we have to look at washers and dryers! I'm the kind of person who loves to scrub a bathroom, but I play no functional role in my own life; I don't know if I've changed a roll of toilet paper in two years."

When Alias wraps for the summer, Garner is set to shoot 13 Going on 30, a comedy known around town as "the Female Big." Her contract guarantees her two weeks off before she begins. Maybe she'll retreat to West Virginia with her husband and her dogs. Maybe she'll scrub the toilet. Don't bank on it, though. There are bad girls to become.