Jennifer Garner's Daughter Thinks Mom Works in a Trailer

By Paul Chi

09/18/2009 at 07:00 AM EDT

Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck may be among the busiest actors in Hollywood, but their first-born daughter Violet has her own ideas about what her parents do for a living.

"The older one thinks that I work in a trailer. She thinks that my work is getting hair and makeup done," Garner, 37, told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival press conference for her new movie The Invention of Lying, costarring Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill and Ricky Gervais, who directed it.

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Violet, 3 ½, also thinks mom's job is to bow to audiences. "If you ask her what I do, she'll say she remembers me bowing on stage when I did a show in New York, and so she'll say, 'My mom sometimes will bow on stage and sometimes she gets her hair and makeup done,'" says Garner. "It's a great job!"

Garner has yet to bring Violet or her little sister Seraphina, 8 months, to Take Your Daughters to Work Day. "She's never seen a set, but she will at some point. She has made it to the trailer and to craft service. She gets M&M's when she comes."

And can Violet expect to see her parents – who last appeared in the same movie six years ago, in Daredevil – onscreen together again?

"The question keeps coming up, and we have literally never spoken about it," says Garner. "He's a beautiful director and such a gorgeous writer but, you know, to go to work with him, I would just be like, 'I need to go home to the kids.'"