Did any of Gwyneth Paltrow’s exes get a candle in her vagina? The actress isn’t sure, but when she jokes with podcast host Alex Cooper during an expansive, gossipy episode. Call Your Father, “That’s what it’s for.”
But Wednesday’s sweeping episode covering Paltrow’s early career (and the “identity crisis” that followed her first Oscar win) had much more gossip about where it came from; Stacked dating list including Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and ex-husband Chris Martin; and Paltrow’s decision to speak out against disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.
In other words: Come for insightful reflections on getting to know yourself as you get older, and stay for the most intense fuck, marry, kill tour the world has ever seen. sadly lost? Any mention of Paltrow’s recently widely announced ski trial, in which a jury found Paltrow not at fault.
Looking back at winning his first Academy Award at age 26 Shakespeare in love, Paltrow recalled, “I worked through many difficult parts of my growth to achieve success.” Taking the golden statuette home, she said, “It put me in a bit of an identity crisis. Because if you win the top prize, what will you do and where will you go?”
“The attention you’re seeing on a night like this and in the weeks that follow is very confusing and frankly really unhealthy,” Paltrow added.
After taking the award home, Paltrow noticed a shift in the way Hollywood and the media perceived and treated her. “I remember the British press treated me so horribly because I cried,” she said. Paltrow probably didn’t know at the time that her grandfather had died of cancer or that her father, who attended the event with her, was also weakened by “all this crazy cancer treatment.”
“I cried and people were so rude about it,” Paltrow recalled. “Wow, there is a huge energy shift going on and I think I thought I should learn to be less open-hearted and a lot more self-protective and filter people better. In a way, it was like a big showdown.”
Paltrow would eventually go on to help make the industry better; As Cooper noted, she was among the actresses who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein in the early days of #MeToo.
“It was frightening,” Paltrow said, “because I grew up watching women raising their voices be humiliated, rejected, humiliated in the town square. I’ve never seen a model where a woman can speak and it’s a man and not a woman.”
One of the things that motivated Paltrow to talk was her own daughter, Apple, and the thought of how she might one day land a job.
“It was like the worst kept secret – it wasn’t that Harvey Weinstein was raping people, it was that he crossed borders and tried things,” he said. “We all knew this happened; My story happened to 10 of my friends. But when I found out exactly what he was doing… I thought, ‘We need to stop this.’”
Cooper also made sure to gossip a bit for every insight and serious moment in the episode. For example: Paltrow also remembered her crush with Brad Pitt.
The two met while working on David Fincher together. Seven. Nine years older than Paltrow, Pitt proposed when she was 24; she said she eventually broke up with him because she didn’t feel ready. (Cooper didn’t ask Paltrow about Angelina Jolie’s allegations of harassment against Pitt; Paltrow described her in a friendly way throughout.)
“In many ways, I didn’t really start coming into my own until I was 40,” Paltrow said. “I had such a nice problem that I didn’t really understand how to listen to my instincts and move from that place, what was right for me.”
When asked to choose between Pitt and Affleck, Paltrow did not expect a comparison category; he said “Brad” the whole way. However, Affleck has earned distinctions like “more likely to make you laugh.” Paltrow warmly recalled that the actor had “a mirror face that he would throw in the mirror,” possibly as a joke.
Still, Paltrow seemed to struggle the most when asked which of the two – Ben or Brad – was better in bed. “This is really hard,” he said. “…because Brad was like great chemistry, the love of your life type… and Ben seemed like he was technically perfect.”
Next, Cooper will need to call Jennifer Lopez – both to check the facts and to explain what “technically perfect” can mean.