Miracles from Heaven: Jennifer Garner and Kylie Rogers Interview

There is no doubt that a parent's worse nightmare is learning that your child has an incurable disease. You exhaust all possibilities, see every doctor but continuously get the same diagnosis. Well, this is the subject of Christy Beam's best-selling novel, Miracles From Heaven which has now been turned into a major motion picture starring Jennifer Garner.

Christy and Kevin Beam's daughter Anna Beam (Kylie Rogers) lives with a rare, incurable disorder that leaves her unable to digest food. Despite the dire diagnosis, devoted mom Christy (Jennifer Garner) relentlessly searches for a way to save her beloved daughter. Everything changes in an instant when Anna tells an amazing story of a visit to heaven after surviving a headlong tumble into a tree. Her family and doctors become even more baffled when the young girl begins to show signs of recovering from her fatal condition.

It sounds hard to believe, but that was exactly what happened. When Jennifer Garner was brought the book's transcript, she also couldn't believe what she was reading but immediately felt compelled to get in touch with Christy Beam. For Garner, the decision to play Beam in the film was a no-brainer. "I stayed up all night reading the script with a knot in my stomach," the actress told me during our recent interview in Los Angeles.

It was also no surprise that Garner, a mother of three instantly bonded with her 12-year-old co-star Kylie Rogers who plays her daughter in the film. The two spent almost every minute together on set and became great friends which is evident when you see them together onscreen.

Kylie Rogers and Jennifer Garner

Garner also says that her own faith has become stronger after making the film, and takes her children to church more often than they went before. The actress, who was separated from her husband actor Ben Affleck during the filming of Miracles from Heaven says that faith has become something important and necessary in her life now. She was raised in a family that went to Church every week and decided that this is something that she wants for her own children.

When asked what she wanted people to take away from the film, Garner emphatically focuses on belief.

"I will be so thrilled if it lifts people's hearts in that way, if it asks anyone to re-examine their own faith and their own beliefs, that would be the pie in the sky for me. I can't think of anything better."

I recently spoke with Jennifer Garner and Kylie Rogers  in Los Angeles about their close bond, having the real-life people they play to draw upon and what miracles mean to them. Check out the full interview below. 

MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN opens in theaters Wednesday, March 16.