A Look Back at Sydney & Vaughn’s ‘Alias’ Romance & the Actors’ Real-Life Relationship
Alias fans got a double dose of nostalgia last month as the ABC spy drama celebrated its 25th anniversary, and Jennifer Garner offered a rare glimpse of her former costar and boyfriend Michael Vartan, who played the Michael Vaughn to her Sydney Bristow.
Yes, life imitated art for Garner and Vartan, though their romance had an ending far different from that of their TV characters. Did Sydney and Vaughn end up together? Here’s the Swooon-y scoop on the duo’s onscreen and offscreen relationship.
Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn’s clandestine chemistry turned into an overt romance.
At the start of Alias’ five season run Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn are in relationships with other people — her boyfriend is Danny Hecht (Edward Atterton), and his girlfriend is Alice Williams (Petra Wright). And in the very first episode, Sydney accepts a marriage proposal from Danny but confesses to him that she’s an operations officer for the CIA. That’s only half-true, as she finds out the hard way. She’s actually working for an enemy organization called SD-6, and when SD-6 discovers her disclosure to Danny, they have the poor guy killed.
So, Sydney becomes a double agent and starts working for the real CIA, and Vaughn becomes her handler. Syd and Vaughn get closer as they work to thwart SD-6 over the next season and a half, and when they finally take down the organization once and for all in Season 2 they share their first kiss.
ABC
But the Season 2 finale ends with a cliffhanger that will haunt shippers forever: After a fight with a clone of her best friend — long story! — Sydney loses consciousness and wakes up with two years of her memory missing. And by that point, Vaughn is wearing a wedding ring.
His wife, as Sydney learns in Season 3, is NSC liaison Lauren Reed (Melissa George). But the marriage is short-lived, and so is Lauren. She turns out to be a double agent herself, secretly working for the Covenant, a group of Russian nationalists obsessed with the 15th-century mystic and engineer Milo Rambaldi. Season 3 ends with Lauren nearly killing Sydney. Luckily, Vaughn arrives in time to finish Lauren off.
In Season 4, Syd and Vaughn join a black-ops division of the CIA called APO, short for Authorized Personnel Only, and that season’s finale brings another shock. Vaughn’s name is actually André Michaux. His father gave them both fake names as he tried to escape his former employers in Prophet Five, another secretive Rambaldi-obsessed organization.
Agents working for Prophet Five seemingly kill Vaughn at the beginning of Season 5, but as that season progresses, we discover Syd and her spy father faked Vaughn’s death to protect him. And in the action-packed series finale, our heroes defeat Prophet Five and other enemies, and a flash-forward reveals Syd and Vaughn married, semi-retired from the spy game, and living with two children in a secret oceanside locale.
Jennifer Garner and Michael Vaughn went from costars to lovers to friends.
While Sydney and Vaughn got closer, so too did Garner and Vartan. In mid-2003, months after Garner split from first husband Scott Foley, her rep confirmed that she and her Alias leading man were dating, per Entertainment Weekly.
Sometime in 2004, however, Garner and Vartan split — and did so, it seems, on the best of terms. “It’s not awkward,” Vartan told a reporter the following year, per the New York Post. “It wasn’t for a second. Jennifer and I were best friends for three years before our little whatever-it-was happened. We’re still best friends. It’s so not anything. Even if it was, Jennifer and I are professional actors, we would never let it impact the show. There was never enough intensity in that relationship for it ever to be awkward.”
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In fact, Vartan told USA Today in 2005 that after their relationship ended and Garner struck up a romance with Ben Affleck, she pulled Vartan aside so he’d hear it from her that she and her Daredevil costar had gotten engaged.
“On the surface, it could have been a recipe for disaster,” he said of working with Garner post-breakup. “But Jennifer and I were best friends first, during [the romance] and after. [I have] heard nothing but wonderful things about [Affleck]. Their love is very genuine. I’m hoping Ben will put me in one of his next movies.”
Garner and Affleck were married from 2005 to 2018, and they share three kids. These days, she’s dating businessman John C. Miller. Vartan, meanwhile, married real estate agent Lauren Skaar in 2011, and the couple split three years later.
And it’s clear Garner and Vartan have remained friends ever since Sydney and Vaughn walked into the sunset together. He attended the party she threw for the Alias’ 20th anniversary in 2021, and she gave him an Instagram birthday greeting when he turned 50 in 2018 and another on the occasion of his 55th birthday.
In an Instagram video montage celebrating Alias’ 25th anniversary on September 30, Garner shared a recent selfie of herself with her arm around Vartan, who was rocking a gray beard and glasses. “They were my whole world, the cast and crew, and they still are,” Garner says in a voiceover for the video. “All these years later, we’ve been together. We’re a little band that’s gone together for the past 25 years.”
