Los Angeles --- Jennifer Aniston was looking sharp in a black pantsuit when she met us recently at a Beverly Hills hotel to talk about her latest film, “Dumplin’,” which is based on the novel by Julie Murphy. In the Anne Fletcher-helmed comedy drama, Jennifer portrays former beauty queen Rosie Dickson, the mother of Willowdean (Dumplin’, portrayed by Danielle Macdonald). Dumplin’, the plus-size teenage daughter of Rosie, signs up for her mom’s Miss Teen Bluebonnet pageant in a small Texas town as a protest. Soon other contestants follow her footsteps which revolutionizes the pageant. So as a child, did she also try to seek an affirmation from her parents? “One of the reasons Rosie spoke so much to me or I really I loved the story, the dynamic, the mother-daughter aspect of it was because it was very similar to in a way what my mother and our relationship was,” she admitted. “She was a former model and she was all about presentation, what she looked like. I did not come out the model child she'd hoped for and so that was always like it was something that really resonated with me was just that this little girl just wanting to be seen and wanting to be loved and a mom who was too occupied with just the things that didn't quite matter but she didn't really know any better. That sort of journey, that arc that they take together and they rediscover each other. JENNIFER ANISTON “Willowdean has resentment towards her mom and the pageants and what this means and what it looks like and I'm sure the pageant girls had the idea of what they thought little Dumplin' was and what she looked like. Then at the end of this movie you realize that all of these people no matter what shapes or sizes or whatever they look like they have so much more in common than they probably ever really understood.” She confessed she never went through a pageant phase as a young kid. “No, I could barely walk a straight line, let alone not fall,” she pointed out. “I was a very klutzy, not so graceful kid.” So what is her relationship to beauty now versus when she started on “Friends?” Is it less important or does she think of it differently? “That sort of goes in waves of what that means to you,” she replied. “It's like when you say you're a beauty icon. I chuckle inside because I've never thought of myself that way. I didn't grow up being perceived that way and I think it really has to do with how you feel about yourself and what that means. I've had moments where I felt horrible and I didn't feel good enough or pretty enough or anything enough and you just have to go through those periods of time and just get stronger. “My idea of beauty is what makes you feel beautiful. And that is the people around you. The life that you have. A good hair day sort of things.” Asked what the biggest misconception about her is, Jennifer disclosed, “That there's some sort of level of unhappiness that I live in that is due to the fact that I don't have some sort of a storybook moment at this stage of my life and that's just simply not true.” As for being famous and how Hollywood has changed her, she confessed, “I don't love being famous. I don't love the negativity that comes along with it. That's what I don't love. I don't love the judgments. I feel like what we get to do every day is go to work, feel excited, inspired, and create something that will be put together and hopefully then put out into the world and received with whatever it wants to get received with. But we work hard and we do it because we love it in order to entertain so that's the only part that I don't love about it. “I also feel that that has increased over the years that negativity has grown and judgment has grown. I don't know if that's the internet or people, faceless people being able to have a platform where they can hide and just write whatever unhappiness they're feeling inside themselves and just throw it out there into the ethers hoping that it'll relieve them of it but it actually probably doesn't. It just makes it grow like a cancer.” As to living an independent life outside of other’s projections, Jennifer said,” I feel as a young kid growing up dreaming of becoming an actress and achieving what my dream was and then being fortunate enough to keep, to continue working and living my dream of being an actress. I feel that I had the really rare moment it does because it doesn't really happen that often of finding true success in that. It's a big job and it takes a lot of work to sustain that and to continue to be good at it and to be better over time and to still be excited and to still feel creatively excited and then as you do that you start to realize well, just being an actress for hire is not as interesting to me now so I would like to now explore more behind the scenes. I would love to explore behind the camera. I would love to explore and continue to feed myself, grow and that's something that I love and I find extremely exciting, fulfilling. I don't feel that I compromised in any way.”