Laura Dern’s Kids Were Excited About Her Working with Hunger Games’ Liam Hemsworth: ‘We Love Gale’ (Exclusive)

The odds were in Laura Dern’s kids’ favor with her new costar.

The actress, 57, and Liam Hemsworth spoke to PEOPLE about their new Netflix romance Lonely Planet, and she revealed that her children — son Ellery, 23, and daughter Jaya, 19 — were fans of Hemsworth’s The Hunger Games movies.

“We love Gale in The Hunger Games so much,” Dern says of Hemsworth’s character Gale Hawthorne. “I loved him as an actor and I’d seen him in a number of films at that point, but they obviously worshiped Hunger Games and loved him too.”

Aside from being a fan of Hemsworth, 34, from a career standpoint, Dern adds that her family was “thrilled about” her working with him, considering his real-life personality.

“Just that he’s such a genuine person [and] that I had someone who was family instantly,” she says.

The two actors, who play love interests in the film, also touched on generational differences — or, rather, a lack thereof — that they felt between them, especially when it comes to social media.

“We are all the same generation except for kids who now literally are given a device in early childhood,” Dern says. “All of us, whatever our ages were, we were bored in childhood. We didn’t have devices. It’s changed so drastically that my daughter talks about how, even for teenagers, they have such a different experience than kids who are 5 to 10 now.”

“So it’s just such rapid shift that for us — growing up as young actors, we didn’t have that scale measuring us. We didn’t consider becoming an actor based on followers and social-media noise,” she adds.

“In fact, we have so many things we share in common. That’s what continued to unfold. Life experiences that were radical parallels.”

Of the Morocco-based movie, Hemsworth says, “We were often filming in places that were so disconnected and remote that we really only had each other in those moments — not that we would be distracted by these other things, but it forced us even more so to be present and in that moment and be living this experience that we were [in the story].”

Lonely Planet follows Katherine (Dern), “a reclusive novelist” who “arrives at a writer’s retreat in Morocco, hoping the remote setting will unlock her writer’s block,” a synopsis reads.

The synopsis adds, “While there, she meets a young man” named Owen (Hemsworth) — and “what starts as an acquaintanceship evolves into an intoxicating, life-altering love affair.”

Asked if there is anything the movie taught them about love, Hemsworth says a big theme in Lonely Planet is “the importance of self-worth in a relationship and being seen and heard and loved for who you are, and not judged and someone having to change someone.”

“I think what the relationship between our two characters is about [is that] they both listen and they both see each other, and that’s enough,” he adds. “Just listen and hear each other and encourage them to be themselves, and remind them of the things that are important to move forward in life.”

Lonely Planet is on Netflix Oct. 11.