Jennifer Aniston's emotional new role about 'overbearing, domineering' mother hits close to home for star

Fox News

14-07-2025

Jennifer Aniston, who is set to star in Jennette McCurdy's new show "I'm Glad My Mom Died," is no stranger to complicated mother-daughter relationships.
On the show, Aniston will play McCurdy's "overbearing, domineering" mother based on McCurdy's real-life experiences as a child star and her 2022 memoir of the same name.
McCurdy, a former child star, will write and co-showrun the series on Apple TV +.
Aniston was raised by her mother, Nancy Dow, after her father, John Aniston, left and says that when she was young her mother, a model, was critical of her appearance.
Aniston told Diane Sawyer in a 2004 interview that her mother told her as a child that her eyes were too close together and her nose was too big.
"She was doing me a favor. She was helping me out by telling me these things, giving me hints, helpful beauty tips," Aniston said. "It wasn't about this is what your problem is, it's this is how you can help that."
She added, "That's probably why I wore so much makeup."
After she became famous as Rachel Green on "Friends," Dow's decision to do a tabloid interview and later write a memoir called "From Mother and Daughter to Friends," caused a rift in their relationship and they stopped speaking.
"She made a mistake, and I don't think she knew any better, obviously," Aniston told Sawyer. "I've definitely tried and I've made the efforts and I've sort of started – it's the stubborn thing of 'Well, I tried enough, now it's your turn,' you know, and maybe that's like where we are, and like I've said, we're now sort of all standing in our corners just waiting for the other to approach probably."
Aniston's mother died in 2016 after the two had reportedly reconciled. "We're all fine," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
McCurdy, who starred as a teen on Nickelodeon's "iCarly" and later on "Sam & Cat," wrote about a mother who she described as an overly critical stage mom set on making her daughter a star and who put her on a restrictive diet at a young age, forcing her to weight herself five times a day. She wrote that her mom also wouldn't let her shower by herself until she was 16.
Her mother died of cancer in 2013.
The show is described as a "heartbreaking and hilarious recounting of Jennette McCurdy's struggles as a former child actor while dealing with her overbearing, domineering mother (Aniston). The dramedy will center on the codependent relationship between an 18-year-old actress in a hit kid's show, and her narcissistic mother who relishes in her identity as 'a starlet's mother.'"
Aniston previously compared her relationship with her own mother to her 2018 role in the Netflix movie "Dumplin'" in which she played a pageant mom.
She told the Sunday Telegraph, "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," according to People magazine.
"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," according to People.
She added, "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…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."
In 2015, Aniston told The Hollywood Reporter of her mom, "She had a temper. I can't tolerate that. If I get upset, I will discuss [things]. I will never scream and get hysterical like that. [But] I was never taught that I could scream. One time, I raised my voice to my mother, and I screamed at her, and she looked at me and burst out laughing. She was laughing at me [for] screaming back. And it was like a punch in my stomach."
She continued, "She was critical. She was very critical of me. Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn't. I never was. I honestly still don't think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine. She was also very unforgiving. She would hold grudges that I just found so petty."