A new life in LA, a new relationship, a new career. Why Gwyneth Paltrow is embracing the future while keeping Chris Martin close to her heart.
First of all, two confessions. Number one: when I arrived to interview Gwyneth Paltrow at her house in Los Angeles, I was so jet-lagged that I couldn’t turn on the recording function on my iPhone, so she had to do it for me. Number two: when we ate lunch together in her kitchen, I choked on the spicy buckwheat noodles, and she had to offer to do the Heimlich manoeuvre. Fortunately, I recovered from the choking without her emergency intervention, but both incidents confirmed my faith in Gwyneth as a good person to have around in a crisis, and not at all the hippie-drippy diva she is sometimes portrayed as in the media. In other words, Gwyneth is a mensch.
The last time I met her was at the end of 2011, when she was still living with Chris Martin and their two children in north London. I’d spent several hours with her there, and he had popped in and out during the course of our conversation. The impression I came away with was that they were reasonably at ease with each other and the domesticity of the family life they’d built together in the UK. But today, in the airy surroundings of her light-filled house, tucked away in a quiet LA neighbourhood, she seems somehow more at home than before, and very relaxed. Her face is gently tanned, glowing without a scrap of make-up; her hair a golden blonde in the Californian sunshine; her body supple and strong, rather than overly thin or sinewy, from her disciplined daily workouts. She is wearing soft, faded jeans (Frame’s Le Garcon cut, available along with other carefully curated pieces on the Goop website) and a white T-shirt; her feet are bare, and she looks like the most natural version of herself, with no visible sign of Botox or fillers, and certainly no surgery.
So how does it feel, being back in the city where she spent the first 11 years of her life? ‘There’s a deep comfort about it because it’s so familiar,’ she says. ‘The other day I was lying on the grass and the kids were playing and I was looking at the blue sky and the palm-trees – and there was something about the weather and the smell and I was, like, eight years old again. I had such a strong memory of being a kid here – it’s a really nice place to be a little kid, and it’s great to watch my children have that experience.’ The family moved to LA just over a year ago (Apple is now 10, and Moses is eight; both are settled in local schools), and after the famous ‘conscious uncoupling’ of her separation from Chris Martin in March 2014, they remain close, geographically – he is living in a house across the road from her – and emotionally. And although both have been in new relationships since they split up – Martin with Jennifer Lawrence, Paltrow with Brad Falchuk (a producer and co-creator of Glee, whom she first met when appearing in several episodes of the television series) – there have been constant rumours that divorce might not be inevitable; that they could even get back together again.
Certainly, when she talks about him, it is with a look of real affection, and the phrase she uses to describe their separation is ‘it’s always a moving, amorphous thing’. As it happens, she plays a forgiving wife opposite a roguish Johnny Depp as her longstanding husband in their forthcoming film, Mortdecai. Gwyneth describes it as ‘an art-heist romantic comedy’ – the plot revolves around the race to recover a stolen painting that is rumoured to contain the code to a bank vault of Nazi gold – but she also observes: ‘At its core, it’s about marriage.’
In the course of our meeting today, we talk a lot about marriage, which is perhaps inevitable under the circumstances. But I am also reminded of our previous conversation, three years ago, when she spoke about her relationship with her husband and her views on how a marriage can survive challenges, even infidelities. ‘The older I get, the more open-minded I get, the less judgemental I get,’ she said at the time. ‘I have friends who I love and admire who have had an affair. When I was younger, I would have said, “He’s a terrible person” or “She’s a terrible person.” But who made these laws?’ She also cited her father’s advice on the secret to a lasting marriage: ‘My parents were married for thirtysomething years, and he said it was because they never wanted to get divorced at the same time.’ As for her own marriage: she appeared (to me, at least) to be navigating the difficulties of living with one of the most famous musicians in the world, who spent a great deal of time on lengthy world tours. ‘I think you do fall in and out of love and you just keep going, and every time you go through a really difficult phase, you rediscover something new and it just gets better. We’ve been married for more than eight years now, and we’re still into it.’
That was then. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to put the swift development of their early relationship into some kind of perspective. She met Chris Martin just three weeks after the death of her beloved father (Bruce Paltrow was a well-respected television and film producer, who died of throat cancer at the age of 58 in 2002). They married a year later, in December 2003, by which time Gwyneth was already pregnant with their daughter Apple. ‘It was very fast,’ she says, and acknowledges that falling in love with Martin was also in some sense bound up with the depth of her mourning for her father. ‘I feel like I would have died somehow if I hadn’t met him at that time. I felt like I was going to die of grief. I remember waking up, on one particular night, where I felt like I was having a heart attack and I couldn’t breathe... I lay on the floor of my apartment in London and I thought, “I’m not going to survive this.” And he just picked me up and he was so loving and patient through all my grieving. He’s really great in a crisis. He has incredible empathy when it comes to somebody’s pain.’ Last week, she says, ‘he was with the child of a friend of his who’s just had a brain tumour removed. And before that, we had a friend in London whose son had a very bad head injury – and every night Chris was at the hospital sitting with the parents. He just has an extraordinary capacity in that way’.
When Gwyneth talks about him, it is with such love that you can see why there is speculation about a possible reconciliation between the two of them; although she also seems to have a realistic perspective on why they split up. He was only 25 when they met, she points out (almost five years younger than her). ‘Too young,’ she says. ‘Men are very young at that age, and I was relying on him very heavily and I really expected him to keep being this grown man and pillar of strength – which he was and is – but it’s also quite an unfair set of criteria to give to someone who’s just 25 years old.’
Inevitably, it’s impossible to ever really know what goes on inside someone else’s marriage – however intense the public scrutiny – but our conversation reminds me why there might be so much vested interest in the outcome of their relationship. Yes, she’s been a film star for most of her adult life, and his career has been equally illustrious; but they also give the appearance of experiencing the same marital problems that many of us have suffered over the years. ‘It’s painful, it’s difficult, it might be easier to say, “I never want to see you again,” but what good does that do anyone?’ she observes. All of which explains their efforts to maintain a close family unit with the children, sharing summer holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations (Martin even offered his support at the launch of her pop-up Goop shop in Dallas last November). ‘We’ve made a lot of mistakes, and we’ve had good days and bad days, but I have to say, I’m proud of us for working through so much stuff together – and not blaming and shaming.’
As a result of that effort to remain friends, she says, it has been possible to emerge with a stronger relationship than before. ‘Of course, there are times when I think it would have been better if we had stayed married, which is always what your children want. But we have been able to solidify this friendship, so that we’re really close.’
Aside from her understandable family preoccupations, Paltrow has also been concentrating on Goop, with a new CEO (Lisa Gersh, a former chief executive of Martha Stewart’s lifestyle brand) and a steady online expansion, developing beyond that into real-life events and retail. She clearly has a feel for the different ways that men and women are responding to the digital world. ‘Men want to look, but women want to engage,’ she says. ‘They want a tactile, emotional experience.’ Hence Goop’s venture into bricks and mortar – the Dallas pop-up was preceded by one in LA; and a clothing line will appear next year, after successful collaborations with fashion brands including that of her friend Stella McCartney.
Occasionally, you might sense a hint of wistfulness about her choice to step back from her acting career; she now makes only one film a year, in order to give time to her children. ‘I’m an actor, and it’s in my DNA, it’s in my bones,’ she says, ‘and I think I’ll always do it.’ But she’s had a good role model in her mother, Blythe Danner, an actress who juggled stage work while Gwyneth and her younger brother Jake were still at school, before returning to a successful Hollywood career in later life (appearing opposite Robert De Niro in the comedy Meet the Parents and its sequels, and as Will’s mother in the television series Will & Grace).
‘It’s a difficult and intricate balance,’ says Gwyneth of her own balancing act between career and motherhood, whereby she works at Goop from an office in her garden, before picking the children up from school, and trying to keep her manageable schedule. It remains to be seen whether she will reprise her role as Pepper Potts opposite Robert Downey Jr in the Iron Man franchise (her highest-grossing films to date, alongside The Avengers, which took more than $1 billion worldwide). Will there be another outing for her in Iron Man or The Avengers? ‘I don’t know,’ she says, with a slightly rueful smile. ‘I’d like to do it. But they might swap me out for an 18-year-old Pepper Potts or something.’
In the past, Paltrow has sometimes been portrayed as an American princess – the entitled daughter of acting patricians, who went to a private Upper East Side school after her family moved to New York when she was 11. This characterisation was also, perhaps, attributable to the convincing nature of her nuanced performances as a privileged beauty in several notable films, including The Talented Mr Ripley and The Royal Tenenbaums. In reality, her soaring career in her twenties was down to talent, discipline and determination (or as she remarks, with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘A lot of good luck and a lot of hard work and a lot of being in the right place at the right time’). ‘But I burned myself out,’ she says now. ‘I was doing three films a year, sometimes appearing in every single scene.
Part of her motivation, she continues, was to make her parents ‘proud’. And although she had been raised in comfortable circumstances, she says: ‘My father was totally self-made. I grew up with the benefit of a great education and a beautiful house, but my father always said, “The day you leave, that’s it. You’re not getting anything,” and he stuck to it. He was so hardcore about me making my own way.’ This was a markedly different approach to many of her contemporaries at school in New York, who relied on family trust funds. ‘But my father always said, “That would ruin your life.” And it does give you such a good sense of your capabilities. I’ve earned everything myself, and I’ve never taken any money from anyone – my father really pounded that into me, so I got the message.’
Her aim as a young woman was far removed from being famous for the sake of celebrity. ‘I just wanted to do what my mother did. I grew up watching her in rehearsals and struggling with lines and weeping with joy after a standing ovation. The camaraderie of the cast appealed to me so much – and it didn’t have to be on an Oscar-winning movie.’
Since then, she has found a not-entirely unrelated form of camaraderie with her colleagues at Goop – ‘I like the companionship of working in a team; we’ve become a collective of women, which I love’ – and admits she prefers it to the loneliness of ‘writing alone at my kitchen table’, as she did with her first cookery book. As a result, she says, she has come to believe in sisterhood, and its power to prevail over more negative emotions, even when she herself has faced attack by the media. ‘Women really need to examine why they’re so vitriolic to other women; why they want to twist words, why they want to read about someone else in a negative light and why that feels good to them... But I also know a huge tribe of women who are loving and supportive of other women, in ways that are completely transformative.’
She’s not afraid of standing by her principles (including her enthusiastic support for President Obama, which included a recent fundraiser for him at her home in Los Angeles), or of speaking out against things she believes to be wrong. Hence her denunciation of p*rn*gr*phy as a distortion ‘that is demeaning and repressive of actual female sexuality’.
Above all, Paltrow believes in a woman’s right to define herself as she chooses. ‘I think we are a generation of women who are different in a lot of respects, and some of us want to be ambitious, and for it not to be a dirty word. We want to be feminine and soft, we want to be maternal, we want to be sexual, we want to be explorers – and we can be a combination of all of these archetypes. You can be powerful, but you can also be vulnerable.’ Finally, she says, she has ‘learnt the power of kindness and the importance of nonjudgemental ways of looking at others’. To which I can only add, isn’t it about time the naysayers stopped pronouncing unkind judgements on Gwyneth Paltrow herself? She’s not superwoman, and nor has she ever claimed to be; instead, she’s trying to navigate her way through the emotional minefields of marriage, motherhood and maintaining a career, just like the rest of us. Because in the end, even golden girls have to grow up...
‘Mortdecai’ is released nationwide on 23 January.
