Did one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s exes buy her vagina candle? The actress isn’t sure, but as she joked with podcast host Alex Cooper during a high-profile, gossip-filled episode of Call her daddy “That’s what he’s here for.”
But there was plenty more gossip about where that came from during Wednesday’s high-profile episode, which covered Paltrow’s early career (and the ‘identity crisis’ that followed his first Oscar win) ; her stacked dating list, which includes Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and ex-husband Chris Martin; and Paltrow’s decision to expose disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.
In other words: come for insightful thoughts on getting to know yourself through aging and stay for the most intense round of “fuck, marry, kill” the world has ever seen. Unfortunately absent? Any mention of Paltrow’s recent and massively publicized ski trial, in which a jury found Paltrow not at fault.
Thinking back to winning her first Oscar at the age of 26 for Shakespeare in love, Paltrow recalled that she had “worked through a lot of the hardest parts of my growing up being successful.” Bringing the gold statuette home, she said, “threw me into a kind of identity crisis. Because if you win the biggest prize, what are you supposed to do and where are you supposed to go? »
“The amount of attention you get on a night like that and the weeks that follow is so disorienting and, frankly, really unhealthy,” Paltrow added.
After winning the award, Paltrow noticed a change in how Hollywood and the media perceived and treated her. “I remember the British press being so awful to me because I cried,” she said. These outlets probably didn’t know at the time that her grandfather was dying of cancer, Paltrow said, or that her father, who attended the event with her, was also weakened to death. the time by “all this crazy cancer treatment”.
“I cried and people were so mean about it,” Paltrow recalled. “I just thought, ‘Wow, there’s this big energy shift happening and I think I’m going to have to learn to be less open and a lot more protective of myself and filter people better. C It was like this grand calculation, in a way.
Paltrow would eventually help change the industry for the better; as Cooper pointed out, she was among the actresses who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein at the start of #MeToo.
“It was scary,” Paltrow said, “because I had grown up watching women who spoke being insulted, rejected, pilloried in the town square. I had never seen a role model where a woman could express herself and there would be repercussions on the man and not on the woman.
Part of what motivated Paltrow to speak out was the thought of her own daughter, Apple, and the type of workplace she might one day walk into.
“It was, like, the worst-kept secret — not that Harvey Weinstein was raping people, but that he was crossing borders and trying stuff,” she said. “We all knew this was happening; my story had happened to 10 of my friends. But when I learned the full extent of what he had done… I just thought, ‘This has got to stop. » »
For every glimpse and serious moment in the episode, Cooper also made sure to dig into some gossip. For example: Paltrow also opened up about her romance with Brad Pitt.
The two met while working on David Fincher together Seven. Pitt, who was nine years older than Paltrow, proposed when she was 24; she ended up breaking up with him, she said, because she didn’t feel ready. (Cooper did not ask Paltrow about the abuse allegations Angelina Jolie made against Pitt, which he denied; Paltrow described it as amicable throughout.)
“In many ways, I didn’t really start becoming myself until I was 40,” Paltrow said. “I had such a nice problem – I didn’t really understand how to listen to my instincts and act from that place, which was good for me.”
When asked to choose between Pitt and Affleck, Paltrow didn’t wait for a comparison category; she went “Brad” all the way. That said, Affleck has earned accolades like “more likely to make you laugh.” Paltrow even warmly recalled that the actor had a “mirror face that he would throw in the mirror,” presumably as a joke.
Still, Paltrow seemed to struggle the most when asked which of the two — Ben or Brad — is better in bed. “It’s really difficult,” she said. “…Because Brad was like kind of a chemistry major, the love of your life…and Ben was like, technically excellent.”
We’ll need Cooper to call Jennifer Lopez next, both for fact-checking purposes and to unpack what “technically excellent” might mean.