When Jennifer Aniston signed up for Dumplin’, she immediately picked up on the parallels between her complicated relationship with late mom Nancy Dow and her role in the upcoming Netflix movie.
“One of the reasons I really loved the mother-daughter aspect of it was because it was very similar in a way to what my mother, and our relationship, was,” Aniston, 49, told The Sunday Telegraph in an interview published on Sunday, December 2.
“She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like,” she continued. “I did not come out the model child she’d hoped for and it was something that really resonated with me, this little girl just wanting to be seen and wanting to be loved by a mom who was too occupied with things that didn’t quite matter.”
In Dumplin’, the Friends alum plays a former pageant queen named Rosie Dickson whose plus-size daughter Willowdean (Danielle Macdonald) enters her beauty competition as a protest.
“This movie is so special because it is about stripping away those preconceived notions of beauty, trying to become individuals and not feeling that we have to live up to some unrealistic ideal that society is feeding up to us,” Aniston told the British newspaper. “My idea of beauty is … what makes you feel beautiful, and what makes me feel beautiful is the people around me, the life that I have. And maybe a good hair day.”
The actress has spoken out several times over the years about how her mom, Dow, was critical of her growing up. They also had a falling out after the Beverly Hillbillies alum penned her 1999 memoir, From Mother and Daughter to Friends, but later reconciled. Dow died at the age of 79 in May 2016.
“It takes a lot of therapy, but you do absolutely get over it,” Aniston said about Dow’s death and their complex relationship at a recent Hollywood Foreign Press Association event. “[Her behavior] was her projection. It had nothing to do with me.”
