Laverne Cox is known her role as Sophia Burset on Orange Is The New Black, for which she made history as the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category.

In a recent interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the actress got candid about lying about her age. 

“I was 28 years old and I was dating a guy that was 21 and he broke up with me because he said I was too old. And I was like, ‘Oh, if I’m too old, I’ll just be 22,” Cox said DeGeneres.

Cox, who could be seen portraying Kacy Duke on the Shonda Rhimes-created Netflix show Inventing Anna, revealed that referred to herself as “over 21” because she felt uncomfortable about lying about her age.

“So I was ‘over 21’ from 2002 to like 2019,” she told DeGeneres, 64. “And then IMDb figured out my real age, and then, so it started appearing places and it was freaking me out. I was having such anxiety.”

The Emmy nominated actress, who says she turns 50 this year, later began embracing her age with help from a therapist.

She later revealed that she revealed her true age for the first time during a speaking engagement in Texas in January 2019.

“I started unpacking these stories about being older,” she explained. “The stories were that I wasn’t hireable, I wasn’t datable, I wasn’t effable over a certain age – apparently the age was like 27 [or] 28 — and then I worked through all that.”

Watch Laverne’s interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show below.