“She’s not that tall, but you can tell she’s strong,” says Jessica Biel, talking about her 55-pound pit bull mix — but she could just as well be talking about herself. Biel and I are discussing our love for our dogs (she sleeps with hers as I do with mine) as we wait for her new best friend, Jennifer Garner, to join us for dinner at Madeo, a legendary Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills where Al Pacino is said to keep a standing reservation.

The hostess has seated us in a booth in the farthest corner from the door in an attempt to offer some privacy, but Biel’s beauty can’t go unnoticed. Fresh from a taping of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Biel has her hair perfectly styled, her makeup perfectly applied. There are sequins sparkling on the T-shirt under her open cardigan sweater. And just moments ago, the whole restaurant watched as she gracefully strode toward this back booth.

Underneath the glitter and gloss, Biel is the real thing. At 27, she has been able to figure out how to take life seriously without taking herself so. I become aware of this when we continue our bonding over the climb she has planned up Mount Kilimanjaro. (I climbed the same mountain a few years back.)

One of a group of environmental activists and artistic types who have named their trek Summit on the Summit, Biel is climbing the mountain to call attention to the world’s clean-water problem.

More children, she informs me, die from polluted drinking water than from AIDS and malaria combined — one child every 15 seconds.

A murmur sweeps through the room, a sound not unlike the low roll of wind along the high heathered regions of Mount Kilimanjaro, as a slightly harried Jennifer Garner rushes through the restaurant and slips into our booth.

“Sorry I’m late, but I got lost and—” Garner stops herself upon seeing the gussied-up Biel. “You look gorgeous!” she exclaims. “And look at me. I didn’t even change my clothes to come here,” she says in the exhausted-but-happily-so tone of a mother with two young children. Garner, 37, is dressed in a black cotton turtleneck and black jeans. She wears no makeup at all, and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She possesses an incongruous combination of sexual charisma and girl-next-door normalcy. There is no artifice about her — it is the essence of her appeal. She is Sandra Dee—nuded.

The two stars became fast friends on the set of the film Valentine’s Day, a kind of American version of Love Actually with a roster of stars that includes Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Patrick Dempsey, Bradley Cooper, Ashton Kutcher, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, and Shirley MacLaine. Biel plays a single sports publicist who hates the holiday; Garner’s character has an affair with an obstetrician played by Dempsey and discovers late in the movie that he’s not what he appears to be.

Read the full article on MarieClaire.com

See the photoshoot pictures on the gallery