Jennifer Aniston got real personal about the relationship with her late mother, actress and model Nancy Dow. 

The actress sat with The Sunday Telegraph to promote her new film on Netflix, Dumplin’, where she plays a former pageant queen whose plus-size daughter enters her competition to make a point about beauty standards.

Jennifer opened up when the reporter asked her if her mom’s relationship reflected the one in her movie. “Where do we start?” she began. “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.” 

“She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like,” Jennifer added. “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.” 

Still, she’s proud of the movie’s message: “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.”