Gwyneth Paltrow on Motherhood, MAHA, Meghan Markle, Making Out With Timothée Chalamet—and Much More

When I ask Paltrow if #MeToo succeeded in changing the industry, she answers with an confident but equivocal “I think so.” For one, “there are no meetings set up in hotel rooms, from what I understand, or if there are, it’s multiple people in the room. That bubble has definitely burst,” she nods. “I’m sure people still abuse power in Hollywood because they do everywhere, but it has definitely changed.”

Incidentally, Gwynothée all but waved off their intimacy coordinator, a choice actors are free to make. “We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’ ” Paltrow recalls. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here’ ”—she lays a milky-manicured hand on her own shoulder—“I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.” She mostly shrugs at simulating all of that sex with Chalamet: “I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’ ”

Paltrow still seems to be holding Hollywood at a secure distance. “I get approached, still, surprisingly a lot, and I say no,” she explains with an admirable lack of coyness. That she’s back at all is mostly because her brother, Jake Paltrow, a filmmaker and Safdie fan, urged her to do Marty Supreme and, for the first time in a long time, she felt free to.

Mixing motherhood and movies—especially the kind that required long shoots abroad—did not appeal to Paltrow. “I didn’t even contemplate doing anything that would take me away from my kids,” she tells me. No judgment to working parents, “but I’ve always sort of understood how finite this period of childhood is.”

Paltrow’s upbringing informed her approach to parenting. She’s not a fan of the term “nepo baby,” but as fans and haters know, Paltrow followed her mother, actor Blythe Danner, and her father, the behind schedule TV director-producer Bruce Paltrow, into the business. (Pop-up Paltrow factoid: Her godfather is Steven Spielberg, who cast her as juvenile Wendy in Hook.) Paltrow, who moved from LA to New York when she was 11, says, “My parents traveled a lot for work when I was young, which they had to, but I think it was sometimes hard for my brother and me.”

“Sometimes you overcorrect from your childhood stuff,” she continues, “and I just wanted to be home as much as possible.” Her children and stepchildren—Isabella, 20, and Brody, 19—factored into her comeback, she jokes with evil-genius vibes, as Marty’s New York shoot meant East Coast proximity to Apple at Vanderbilt, Moses at Brown, Isabella at Cornell, and Brody at Yale.

For years Paltrow starred in a heady mix of awards bait (Shakespeare in Love), cultishly loved rom-coms (Sliding Doors), less enduring rom-coms (Shallow Hal), karaoke musicals (Duets), and the occasional sci-fi adventure (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). The churn depleted her, physically and emotionally: “I was really disenchanted with how I was treated for a lot of it,” including “the disparity between male costars and all that, which now sounds cliché, but it’s really true and it’s hard to live.”