NXT Jennifer Aniston Admits She and Jennette McCurdy ‘Had Very Similar Moms’ Ahead of I’m Glad My Mom Died Filming

It was an easy yes when Jennifer Aniston was offered a part in the TV adaptation of Jennette McCurdy‘s memoir.

The iCarly alum opened up about her traumatic childhood in her 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, and the real-life story is coming to the small screen on Apple TV, the streamer announced in July, with Aniston, 56, attached to star as a fictionalized version of McCurdy’s mom.

“When it came across my desk as an option, an offer to play this character and work with Jennette and Sharon Horgan and LuckyChap, I was pretty much immediately intrigued and flattered and excited,” Aniston tells PEOPLE. “It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be pretty great to start shooting it.”

She praises the memoir as “so beautifully written,” and says McCurdy, 33, “is so special.”

“The fact that she’s the young woman that she is, having lived that life, is nothing short of remarkable,” Aniston says during a conversation about her latest campaign with Pvolve to launch the Longevity Bundle.

There’s another, more personal reason she was drawn to the story and the show — which she will also serve as an executive producer on — though. “We have a lot in common,” Aniston says of herself and McCurdy. “We had very similar moms.”

McCurdy’s mom, Debra, died in 2013, and in the memoir, she alleged that Debra had forced her into acting, which she claimed led her to develop an eating disorder and allowed her to be exploited during her career as a young actor.

Aniston has similarly been open about her estranged relationship with her mother, Nancy Dow, who died in 2016.

“She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like. I did not come out the model child she’d hoped for,” she told The Sunday Telegraph in 2018 while promoting Dumplin‘, a story she said “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 has also said that she grew up in a “household that was destabilized and felt unsafe,” and called her mom, who divorced her dad, John Aniston, when she was 9, “critical.”

“She was very critical of me. Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn’t. I never was,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I honestly still don’t think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine.”