Vanessa Kirby says she won a new appreciation for the “sacredness of the feminine” while preparing for her upcoming Netflix film, Pieces of a Woman. She graced the latest cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and inside, she talked about how she studied live birth scenes to prepare for the film’s 23-minute home birth scene.

The 32-year-old shares: “I watched her for six hours go through a really difficult labor, no painkillers, forceps. It got really, really difficult…I watched her go on a completely lone journey, like an odyssey, through the most primal, almost divine…And I saw the power and the fear in all of it.”

“I came away far more of a woman in appreciating the sacredness of the feminine in a way that I don’t think I had fully realized,” she said. “I feel like I had lived something in human experience I hadn’t lived before.”

She continued, “It brought everything that I sort of had known intellectually into being, which is, this is like the magnificence of being a woman, and its creation essentially.”

In Pieces of a Woman, she plays a woman who loses her baby after birth at home. Shia LaBeouf co-stars.