Dawn is yet to break on America’s East Coast and I’m curled up in a jet-laggy ball on the backseat of a black tank of an SUV hurtling across the Williamsburg Bridge, Hamptons bound. Why? I’m off to meet Gwyneth Paltrow, of course! And boy is my mind racing.
Are you obsessed? Guys, I am obsessed. I don’t think there’s a stranger I’ve spent more time thinking about over the past three decades than GP. To be frank, if you’ve ever seen me zoning out of a conversation, it’s likely my mind will have drifted to one of the following. 1. That shamrock-green Donna Karan two-piece she wore in Great Expectations (1998). 2. Twin fringes with Brad (1997). 3. Jade vagina eggs, obviously (2017). 4. The uncoupling, duh (2014). 5. The “I wish you well” delivered stage-whisper style into the ear of a retired optometrist who accused her of negligent skiing (2023). And 6. Whatever the hell bathroom snafu went down with a house guest at her home last year. And that’s before we even get to the scores of delicious, shrapnel-laden wisdom she’s been rat-a-tat-tatting our way over the years. Truly it is impossible to pick a fave from her (largely self-aware?) immortal and incendiary one-liners. But how about this one: “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” as she once declared. (I can’t help but agree.)
Yet it’s not hard to imagine the emotional tax that the unique piquancy of Paltrow’s global fascination can bring. There is, it must be said, a certain sort of person whose nerves the 53-year-old actor-cum-21st century lifestyle nexus can trample on like no other. Lodged in collective minds in a netherworld of Grace Kelly, Marie Kondo and Brené Brown, her brand of international glitz and Gwynnie-knows-best advice for your BMI, your family trauma, the minimum micron count of cashmere that a person may reasonably tolerate, can raise a heckle. Sure, it’s led to economically harnessable interest in her every uttering, but also to some tricky days for her. I’m afraid to report, dear reader, today is one such.
Less than 24 hours ago, Gwyneth: The Biography was published by the journalist Amy Odell. While the “The” of its title might imply a level of direct access (next to none) and import (Claire Tomalin this ain’t) of this modestly simmering potboiler, the relative thinness of the material hasn’t swayed scores of news websites and countless social media accounts from having a little pop at GP this morning. As I hurtle along Long Island, dawn finally breaking over a grey Atlantic, I scroll several dozen TikToks where strangers of every stripe are frothing away to their front cameras about the ups and downs of Goop (her fashion, food and objet singulier product and curation portal), her supposed fallings out with other famous folk (eg a disputed Madonna story), and general crimes such as – what, exactly? Crying at the Oscars? Having Steven Spielberg for a godfather? Forever acknowledging though never hand-wringing quite enough at the good fortune of her life?
Later, in the flawless parlour of her Amagansett home, sat cross-legged in front of me on a zig-zagging Pierre Yovanovitch sofa, roughly the span of an industrial hand-glider, upholstered in an earthy magnolia bouclé so fine it’s like a floating on a cloud of good taste, the subject herself will sigh in a faraway manner and say of her life, quite earnestly actually: “What’s upsetting, I think, is you can feel when there’s a lot of energy swirling around you, whether it’s positive or negative. So there are just certain times when my nervous system just tanks. Like after that ski trial, after I won the Oscar, after my dad died. I can think of these certain moments in my life where my nervous system sort of totally gave out, and I needed to repair and get deeply back in touch with who I am and what’s important to me and why I’m here.”
At this, she looks at me dead-on. For someone deemed a Waspy cow for much of her time in the public eye – today, as always, her hypnotically flat, upscale American tone is light on emotion, heavy on effect – she is never not thoughtful, amused, a touch sad even. People love to bang on about her being “out of touch”, but she’s very human, you know. She puts great store in honesty – or at least her experience of it – hence all those devil-may-care zingers over the years. Still, with no apparent complaint, she might still prefer not to be thought of as some ice queen sketch of a human. “It is quite something, being this person in the culture for all these years,” she continues. “It is a lot to hold because energy is real. The superstring physicists proved this. A molecule flying towards someone can change direction with intention, with thought behind it. To me it feels real. So to your point, I’m pretty good at being able to weather the storms, but sometimes there’s an accumulation of energy that makes me feel pretty fragile. Ultimately I’m just a mammal like anyone, but I’m expected to have this superhuman capacity to body all of this energy and thought.”
Classic Gwynnie: string theory to explain a rough 24 hours for her on the MailOnline. But is she wrong? In truth, the Odell book isn’t fully registering on the Richter scale of her life’s dramas. Have you read it, I ask, a touch sheepishly. “Oh God no,” she retorts lethally, dry as Ryvita. Well, I tell her, for starters there’s a funny slice of meta in the first chapter, in which the writer says you specifically use Vogue interviews to micro-manipulate your public image, rather than face any sort of real accountability. We give each other a look.
Anyway, I push on, it’s actually quite… I pause a moment, keen not to be entirely discourteous to the work of another writer. “Boring,” says Gwyneth, with devastating indifference.
It turns out that while GP hasn’t cracked the spine herself, her husband of seven years – the much-liked television writer, director and producer Brad Falchuk, known for his many projects with Ryan Murphy, from Glee to American Horror Story – did the honours and reported back. “So my husband flicked through it, just because I was like: ‘What is in this?’” she says, leaning in. “He said, ‘It’s as if somebody put in a prompt in ChatGPT and said: mine every Daily Mail article and write a biography about Gwyneth Paltrow.’” She is deeply unimpressed, her default setting of low-key mirth momentarily replaced with frustration. “She totally missed everything, the truth of who I am, what my impact is. He was like, ‘It’s just bad. It’s really badly written.’ I was like, ‘OK.’” She shrugs again – but the fallout grates. “The stuff that I saw in People magazine, and [other outlets that picked it up], it was all rubbish, the things that I supposedly said.”
The book’s lack of chic, of sparkle, of tome-like heft, likely rankles too. That it will also make it to so many sunloungers and commuter trains in the coming months will probably be hell too, for someone so addicted to the exquisite. To these vexations Paltrow would add: “I think it’s very sexist. I was like, ‘OK, hang on a sec. Why do the men get Walter Isaacson and I get this hack?’ You know?”
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I start chuckling involuntarily. Catching herself, she joins in. Paltrow’s ability to be savage yet hilarious, righteous but measured, is really something. Look, I tell her. It’s not all bad. The book also says that you invented ghosting, which is kind of boss.
“Oh, that is boss. I didn’t know that. Did I?” Yes. Apparently when you’re over people – lovers, friends – it’s finito. Texts on read. TTYN. “Oh, good. OK, I’ll take that,” she says, flitting her gaze to the middle distance and delivering the first madly bewitching grin of the day. You’ll know the one. That iconic, out-of-reach smile that makes most sense on the big screen.
Book-wise, there are some accusations about the day-to-day workings at Goop that Paltrow wants to weigh in on and to which we will return. But first: here’s the big career news. For the first time in half a generation, the GP is back in a (non-superhero, non-telly) movie. In fact – Pepper Potts aside, which laterly involved lucrative and sporadic supporting work, deadpanning in front of a Marvel green screen opposite Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man – it’s been close to 15 years since she really put her back into it cinema-wise. And oh boy, what a return.
On Boxing Day – Christmas Day if you’re reading this in America – Marty Supreme will lope into cinemas with all the sloe-eyed swagger of a serious, old-school Oscar botherer (a genre Paltrow herself helped innovate, then hone, in the 1990s and 2000s, via Shakespeare in Love, The Talented Mr Ripley and The Royal Tenenbaums). The pedigree of her new venture – do we call it a comeback? – has serious allure: Josh Safdie as director; Timothée Chalamet as costar. No riff-raff. Makes sense, I think, as having buzzed her intercom earlier, the gate of her compound swung open to reveal several acres of grass so emerald-like, gravel so Provençal-perfect, punctuated with mature trees, its main house and scattered outbuildings achingly darling in flinty black brick, that I almost squeaked a tear. Tracy Anderson had just stopped by in person as a little treat for Paltrow’s morning workout, while her stepdaughter and boyfriend are kicking around emanating the energy of late summer’s luckiest college-goers, popping to the sauna, grabbing a little snack from GP’s kitchen of dreams. Why would a person ever leave this life?
Paltrow, in full knowledge of how good she’s got it, agrees. “My husband was making fun of me the other day because we have this app where we can all see where everybody [in the family] is. It was Wednesday and he was like, ‘The app says you’ve been at home since last Thursday.’” She starts laughing. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually getting weird.’”
She looks – steady yourself for some penetrating observational work here – absolutely great. She is literally wearing an old white shirt and beige tracksuit bottoms yet the effect is somehow mesmeric. “Oh my God,” she says, rolling her eyes. “This is, like, a 10-year-old linen shirt. Mystery provenance.” Her tan, a shade one can only describe as “billionaire biscuit”, is very much popping. “Oh, yeah. I’m always tan. These are sweatpants from The Great, which is a little California brand. Oh, this is a vintage men’s French chain,” she says of the light scattering of gold jewellery at her neck. “And this I got myself actually as a present. It’s an evil eye for protection.” Is it working? “I got it yesterday. I’ll let you know.”
A little protection might be in order now that she’s a working movie star again. It didn’t take much to turn up the dial there, to be honest. At Milan Fashion Week just gone she caused a stir, alongside Demi Moore, when she turned up live to watch Demna’s first presentation as Gucci’s new creative director at a hypnotically glamorous screening of a film that featured Moore and his debut collection.
Meanwhile Paltrow is set to make a cool-headed return to the red carpet for the first time in some years. People are excited, I say. “Oh, God. Well, everybody except me.” Come on – you are such a fashion person. “I do love fashion, I really do,” she replies, smiling. “I think it’s going in a bit of a funny direction these days, so I’ll bring back my old school.” Oh, my, are you going to course-correct the red carpet, Gwyneth? “Can you imagine?” she deadpans. “The thing about me is my style doesn’t really change that much. I believe in tailoring and a certain restraint, but always with a little bit of a twist to it. You know?”
With her children flown to university – Apple, 21; Moses, 19 – Paltrow conceded she might benefit from some displacement activity to ease her into life’s next chapter. She is bracingly upfront about her relationship to her “craft”. “I’m good at it. I enjoy certain parts of it,” she says of acting. “It’s very much part of the story of who I am, but I don’t daydream about it. I don’t fantasise about what role I haven’t played yet.” She cocks her head in thought. “I don’t know why.”
The Marty Supreme script, chronicling the highs and lows of a 1950s New York shoe salesman-cum-international table tennis champ, was buzzier than all get-out and Bryan Lourd, her friend and super-agent, who runs Creative Artists Agency, and her brother Jake, a director and writer, had both read it and thought the – get this – chilly, retired movie star called Kay Rockwell, who Chalamet’s rizz-fuelled Marty extravagantly finesses into bed, would be perfect for her. Go figure.
“I wanted a landed gentry quality,” Safdie tells me of his campaign to sign Paltrow, “a type of person who was completely unreachable by Timmy’s character. There was that unreachable quality to Gwyneth – especially to someone like myself who grew up watching her films. Really, she was untouchable. She was a goddess.”
For costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, working with Paltrow was a pinch-me moment. “Gwyneth brings her own kind of fashion history, just by the nature of herself,” she explains, saying she drew heavily on the post-war work of Dior and Givenchy for Kay’s sumptuous suiting and separates. Marty is, in many ways, a fashion film and Paltrow, says Bellizzi, is once again “iconic”.
With a reported budget of around £50 million, the film is the most expensive in studio A24’s history, so there’s plenty riding on it. Likely because she is so particular – “I have a horrible affliction. It’s not actually OCD, it’s perfectionism,” she sighs gravely when we first sit down – the easy read is that she’s controlling. Actually, she appears to find great comfort in taking good advice from smart people, then cracking on with it. To wit: she had minimal knowledge of Chalamet when she signed on. “I first met him at the costume test. I was asking him questions, trying to get to know him,” she recalls.
The rise of Timmy passed you by? “I know!” she says, laughing. “Everyone makes fun of me because I don’t know anything. I was like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ And he was like, ‘I do.’ He mentioned that she had kids and I was like, ‘That’s so cool. I really love to hear that [from] a young man like you.’ I understand a 45-year-old who has his own kids going out with a woman with kids, but it’s a cool choice to go out with a young woman who has two kids. I respect it. I think it’s kind of punk rock. But my point is I didn’t know [it was] Kylie Jenner…”
As its release approaches, much has been muttered about the sex in the movie, mostly by Paltrow (forged in the ironmongers of ’90s Hollywood, her mind was understandably blown by the concept of an intimacy co-ordinator). Yet she saw the film in its entirety a few days before we meet and now says: “When we were doing it, there was a lot of rolling around [but] it’s actually quite… palatable.” The sex “accomplished exactly what it was there to do. I would say that the nature of the relationship between Kay and Marty is very transactional. It’s quite cold. It’s not a romance, it’s like a transaction, basically.”
The shoot wasn’t super easy for her, however. She confesses to feeling “rusty” at first and the location scenes in New York were a literal trigger. One camera lens is fine. Two or more – in this case dozens of paparazzi trailed her and Chalamet on the streets – and she can’t stand it. “I have PTSD,” she says of how photographed her life became 30 years ago. “Now if I’m doing a photoshoot and there’s, like, BTS video, I’m just like, ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but I can’t.’”
Still, there were upsides of a sort – the ultimate mum-flex, at least. “Oh my God, all of my mom group chats were on fire,” she says of the day when images of her and Chalamet pashing in costume disseminated near-live across the internet. What was the tone? “Everyone was like, ‘Yes, GP, get it!’” She chuckles warmly. “I’m like, ‘Guys, calm down,’” she adds quickly, though I’d be remiss not to report that a “still got it” smile is tickling the corners of her mouth.
And, my word, did she have it. These days, Gen Z especially enjoys bigging her up like a sporting hero with a glorious hall-of-fame run of wins, though in GP’s case they mean men not medals. A lot of it hinges around her one-time beaux Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck, and ex-husband Chris Martin. When she appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast a while back she was happy to entertain debate on the merits of the first two (Ben the more technically proficient lover, apparently, though she concedes that each had their charms). In fact, younger fans seem to have a much less complicated relationship with Paltrow than her mid-life peers. “I love her!” was the take of more than one of the 20-something team here at Vogue when I said I was off to meet her.
Interestingly, the “toxic boss” stuff doesn’t seem to be sticking. No floodgates were opened by the Odell book, which included some spicy claims from some anonymous sources about Paltrow commandeering staff to help out at home, criticised her “chaos”-inducing insistence on being at the centre of every decision, and alleged that her warmth towards staff could rise and set like the sun, leaving workers destabilised and stressed out.
Yet Paltrow is simply not having it that she presides over a bad working environment. “That bothers me. ‘Oh, Goop has a toxic culture.’ That drives me insane because we have never had that. Granted we’ve had a couple of toxic people and, because of my fear of confrontation, maybe I didn’t deal with it quickly enough. That does cascade down and I totally take responsibility for that. But we are such a good culture. We are,” she says, emphatically. “It’s something that I am so proud of and worked so hard on, and…”
She pauses a moment, wondering how this will all sound. “Of course, I’m going to say: ‘It’s not a toxic culture,’” she regroups slightly. And people have different experiences, I suggest. “Of course! We are all human beings who go to work, sometimes with unresolved stuff and that comes out. People can have bad work experiences anywhere. But I can guarantee if I dropped you into the Goop office in Santa Monica, you’d be like: ‘What the fuck are these people talking about?’ You would see really engaged, really brilliant, highly collaborative teams who are excited. So I don’t like that kind of stuff – it impacts the team.”
Last year, Goop recorded its best year of revenue to date. Begun as a newsletter of GP’s personal recommendations in 2008, it now spans everything from restaurants across Los Angeles (Goop Kitchen… Mediterranean bowl food, anyone?) to its recently rebranded fashion line (Gwyn: unimpeachably tasteful knits, skirts and leather goods pitched around a Toteme price point). You sense – for more profit and a quieter life – she is moving on from the jade egg era into more scalable verticals, such as beauty and fashion, though a certain “quirkiness” remains key to the DNA. A recent Goop addition is Find Online, where the team source one-off delights to sell, such as recycled cashmere from the Californian brand West Channel Rd. “Or fun stuff,” says Paltrow, “like my cigarette case from 1990 with my initials on it.”
I’ve been dying to ask her when she last had a cigarette. Famously there was a time when – twinning her essences of extreme cool and fearsome willpower – she would, as a younger mother, repair to the bottom of her garden to smoke a single cigarette each week. “Yes,” she confirms, solemnly. “It was heaven.” When was your last ciggy? “Oh, sadly I remember it well. It was the night we got married seven years ago. We were redoing our paperwork and I got life insurance, and it said that if anything happened to me and they knew that I had smoked a cigarette, it would nullify the whole thing. Because I’m such an Enneagram 1 – which is like, ‘integrity is everything’ – I never smoked again.” Well, it’s probably for the best. “I miss it, though. I was saying to Brad, maybe when I’m 85, I’ll start again. That’d be so awesome.”
On a roll, I ask when she was last properly drunk. “Oh, man, so long ago. I think it was my 43rd birthday. Brad had this dinner for me in New York City and a bunch of my friends from high school were there, and Cameron Diaz, one of my best friends, and her husband, Benj. We had this great Chinese dinner, then someone was like, ‘Let’s go dancing.’ I did shots and I was hammered. The next morning I had a meeting and I’ll never forget it. I was like, ‘Would you excuse me for a second?’ And I went and puked in the bathroom and then came back. That was the last time.”
Junk food? “Oh, last night,” she says. “A friend came over and I ate a chocolate-covered Oreo. That is trans fats to the max. That’s, like, seed oils all the way. But once in a while it’s so important to follow those cravings. I love it.” Her 50s have tempered her in many ways. “I think it’s all about balance. Going too strongly in any direction is never good.”
“When my dad had cancer [noted producer Bruce Paltrow was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1999 and died in 2002], I went really strictly macrobiotic, hoping that, by proxy, I would somehow get him on a healthier eating plan or heal him, which didn’t work. But I was really, really strict on it for a while. But I’m not so strict in my old age. I’m much easier on myself, I would say.”
A Paltrow day is perhaps not so different from how you might imagine it. She wakes around 6am each morning, though doesn’t get up right away. “Brad and I always have a cuddle before we get out of bed and just set the day. Then I go downstairs and have coffee.” Raw cream? “I can’t find the raw cream here!” she says, aghast. Anyway, like a trooper, it’s onwards to her “Tracy” workout three days a week “and heavy Pilates reformer thing twice a week, because my perimenopausal bones need to do heavy”. She’ll squeeze in a sauna and a cold plunge “when I can bear it. Brad is a really good plunger.” By this point the relentless emails and Zoom meetings have begun, but she’ll gulp down a protein-heavy smoothie (bones again) – though they can make her “gag” – and a family lunch, likely with salad and some sort of fish. Today she also has online fittings and a podcast to record, but at the end of it she’ll be on holiday, heading to her place in Italy for a couple of weeks, so “It’s go, go, go until dinner time and then I’m going to throw my fucking computer in the Atlantic Ocean.”
She beams. Paltrow likes her life (shocker), loves her children, her husband, her stepchildren. If Marty Supreme brings her an Oscar nod, great. If not, that’s OK too. Likewise, if Goop creates some profit and joy she’ll be pleased, though she’d very much like more respect put on her name for bellwethering countless wellness trends that became mainstream, building a nine-figure business in the process, while too often being the butt of the joke.
Tellingly, it’s not the movies or the entrepreneurship that sit top of her mind when she considers her fortunes. “I do believe there’s a strange energy in the world right now and I like to disconnect from it as much as possible. I’m at peace when I’m home and I hopefully have a couple of kids rattling around, but this is also where I feel so incredibly lucky about my marriage and the kind of friendship that we have, and companionship, and kismet. Because I could just be with him in the most simple of all surroundings and be totally fulfilled and in a good place.”
On her perfect sofa, in her perfect shirt, Paltrow leans back and says of the things of which she is proud, letting the world in on the family breakdown and rebuild post her first marriage in the mid 2010s sits near the top – her and Martin’s conscious uncoupling of lore. Of course, the notion that she was doing divorce better than everyone else drove people crazy initially. “There’s a lot of hurt around divorce. It’s a difficult subject and I think why people got so upset was that they heard, ‘Well, then, we did it wrong’ or ‘My parents did it wrong,’ which I understand. But it was really because we had so many friends who had been so hurt by divorce that we wanted to try to do it a different way.”
A decade on, trying to mindfully navigate a marital split seems wildly uncontroversial. Love or hate her, Paltrow can take some credit there. “I’m still so proud that we did that and that we live it. I cannot tell you how many people come up to me and thank me for that, and for helping to create that template. I feel like there needs to be a book, because it was real trial and error.” She gives another smile, the grin not so far away this time, before dispensing GP’s ultimate advice for life. “We fucked a lot of things up and then we got a lot of things right.”
Cover image: embroidered cotton hoodie, Balenciaga. Tricolour gold hoop earrings (throughout), Cartier. Gold and pavé diamond ring, Tiffany & Co. Hair: Jawara. Make-up: Emi Kaneko. Nails: Megumi Yamamoto. Set design: Rosie Turnbull. Production: Tann Services. Digital artwork: May.