In her new Netflix movie, “Dumplin,” Jennifer Aniston plays a former Texas beauty queen whose plus-sized daughter stages a protest by entering the beauty pageant she runs.
Aniston reveals in a new interview that she was attracted to the film because it reminded her of her own fraught relationship with her mother, Nancy Dow, who was similarly obsessed with standard ideals of female beauty and who didn’t think her daughter measured up. Dow, an actress and model, died in 2016.
“She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like,” Aniston, 49, explained in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
“I did not come out the model child she’d hoped for.”
Of course, many consider Aniston to be one of America’s most glamorous and admired female celebrities, with her honey-blond hair and slender, seemingly ageless body. She always turns heads on red carpets or in magazine spreads.
But Aniston has long talked about how she never felt “gorgeous,” and she says that’s because of Dow.
“She was critical,” Aniston explained in a 2015 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “She was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn’t. I honestly still don’t think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine.”
For these reasons, Aniston’s new role in “Dumplin” really hit a nerve.
“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,” Aniston told The Daily Telegraph.
“Dumplin,” based on a young adult novel of the same name, follows a teenage girl named Willowdean, who enrolls in her mother’s Miss Teen Bluebonnet pageant as a way to break barriers and push boundaries. Her mother, Rosie Dickson, is ruffled by her daughter’s choice and by other girls signing up when they don’t have the usual beauty queen looks.
“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 said. “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.”
Aniston’s mother was a TV actress in the 1960s, appearing in shows such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Wild Wild West.” In 1965, she married actor John Aniston, who later became known for his role on “Days of Our Lives.” Dow and Aniston divorced in 1980.
Aniston’s difficult relationship with her mother made news in 1999 when Dow published a tell-all, “From Mother and Daughter to Friends: A Memoir.” The women started to mend their rift in 2005 after Aniston’s divorce from first husband Brad Pitt, but their relationship never fully healed, according to the Daily Mail.
They had little contact until 2011, when Dow suffered a stroke, the Daily Mail said. That’s reportedly the last time they saw each other until two weeks before Dow’s death in 2016 at age 79. Aniston didn’t invite her mother to her to her 2015 wedding to Justin Theroux. Her father also didn’t attend the wedding, but the father and daughter have remained close, the Daily Mail said.
Netflix releases “Dumplin” on Dec. 7.
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