All eyes on Gwyneth Paltrow.
Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for goop
Gwyneth Paltrow may not know what movies she’s in or who she’s in them with, but Amy Odell has been keeping track. Her new book, Gwyneth: The Biography, brings readers inside the world of everyone’s favorite (or least favorite) actress-mogul-nepo-baby-wellness pioneer. Throughout the past 30 years, the Oscar-winning Paltrow has evoked as much derision as she has devotion, because when it comes to Gwyn and Goop, everyone has an opinion. In the biography, out July 29, Odell looks back at all the moments that made Paltrow the divisive figure she is today.
Odell tracks Paltrow’s evolution from being born into Hollywood royalty to blossoming into a controversial wellness guru. Throughout the book, the author shows that Paltrow has never known any version of “normal” — she was on her first film set when she was 12 days old, after all. Odell previously wrote a book about Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Anna: The Biography, but while Wintour provided access to her friends and colleagues, Paltrow offered no such help. Instead, to tell Paltrow’s full story (so far), Odell, previously the editor of Cosmopolitan.com before launching her Substack newsletter, Back Row, accessed thousands of newspaper and magazine articles about Paltrow and interviewed 220 people who interacted with her throughout her career. There are revelations sprinkled throughout the biography about her relationship with Brad Pitt (she always knew they were mismatched, even before they were engaged), Harvey Weinstein (their relationship fell apart partially because of Paltrow’s brother, Jake), and Goop (which she calls “a powerful platform for spreading health misinformation”). “This book had an opportunity to pull back the curtain on who she is,” Odell says, “and how she became someone who we are so magnetically attracted to, but who is also really polarizing.”
What did you see as the biggest missing piece in the popular understanding of Gwyneth?
What helped me understand her is putting together her childhood. She’s been in the news a lot for tone-deaf or oblivious comments. And she had this really unusual upbringing, as the daughter of Hollywood royalty, Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow. She was nursed on a movie set when she was 12 days old. She had this childhood where she was going between Los Angeles and New York.
One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is that, when Bruce would fly with her and her brother, Jake, between the coasts, he would fly with them first class. Blythe, who went to a Quaker high school, would fly coach. One time, Gwyneth gets on the plane with Blythe and says, “You mean instead of flying first class, we’re flying no class?” She grew up in this elite, rarefied, luxurious world, and she hasn’t really ever known anything else — I mean her godfather is Steven Spielberg.
How close to “real” Gwyneth Paltrow is a “drag” Gwyneth Paltrow, playing off the public’s preconceived notions of her?
I saw the play Gwyneth Goes Skiing when it was in New York, and it was really fun. That version of her was very warm and oblivious. In some ways, that’s right, but she’s so much more complex than that. While she can be very warm and charismatic and make you feel like you’re her best friend, she can also be cold and aloof. People compared her to Anna Wintour. That really surprised me. We’ve seen her on talk shows so many times, right? And the Gwyneth that we’ve seen on TV is not the same Gwyneth that a lot of people saw. Her acting experience really helped her as a person and entrepreneur. When she was starting Goop and they were seeking to raise money from venture capitalists, she could get in the room and say everything she needed to say and just deliver it absolutely perfectly because she’s an Oscar-winning actress.
Do you think the inflammatory statements are intentionally crazy?
Sometimes! And she weaponized that with Goop, which is smart. When Goop was launching a travel app, there was a media buy associated with it, so they needed to have a certain number of downloads. Gwyneth told the office, “Just call it ‘G-Spotting’ and everyone will make fun of me, and then we’ll get all the downloads we need right there.” And that worked. She’s also a very effective model for Goop. So when G. Label, the clothing line, first launched, they had this white leather tote bag that wasn’t selling. They had stock piling up, and Gwyneth says, “Do I need to be photographed with that?” She was photographed with the bag and it sold. There were also those controversies relating to Goop’s wellness products. Sometimes they knew what was going to inflame people and they leaned into that — they would see a traffic spike, and a person who’s there to gawk might buy a sweater. But they didn’t always know. The Jade Egg just went bananas.
One of my favorite threads in the book is how much Gwyneth hates photo shoots.
She doesn’t like having her time wasted, and that burned her out on movies a little bit. When you’re filming a movie, you’re sitting around waiting. Sometimes she has her Goop staff come and work with her. People told me that, if she gives you a directive over email and you reply “Thanks,” she’s like, “Don’t send emails like that. That’s a waste of time.”
In comparison to Gwyneth, Brad Pitt comes off like a country boy in stories, which is probably a surprise to people who only know their relationship from Pinterest photos.
My memory of that relationship going into the book was that they were iconic in the ’90s. They dressed alike, they were a really big deal, they were engaged, and then they broke up. I know that some disturbing stories have come out about Brad in recent years, but I will say that people I talked to really liked him. Her dad really liked him. But her friends didn’t think they had a lot in common. And she didn’t think they had a lot in common either, because she had this “sophisticated” upbringing and Brad did not. He was raised in a religious Baptist household in Missouri. He’s an actor who came from nowhere, drove himself out to L.A., wore a chicken costume, and just clawed his way to the top — and she’s Hollywood royalty.
The quote in which she said, “Brad and I have very different upbringings. When we go to restaurants and order caviar, I have to say to Brad, ‘This is Beluga and this is Osetra’” is so shocking as something printed in a magazine. What was your takeaway from the ’90s magazine coverage of Gwyneth?
You can see the seedlings of the Goop persona, when she said stuff like that more frequently. But the media was just so different. If people talked about nepotism, it wasn’t scornful. The press didn’t turn on her until after she had won her Oscar. There was no internet — it’s not like she would say something and it would go viral. When she and Brad took a vacation to St. Barts, they were photographed nude, which is a horrible invasion of privacy. But I was asking people who knew her: This seems really horrible and traumatic; how did she deal with that? They were like, The photos were kind of just in a couple of newspapers and she kind of brushed it off.
There’s a perception that you push back against in the book that Gwyneth didn’t experience much of Harvey Weinstein’s bullying, despite working with Miramax often. What did you learn about their relationship?
People who I talked to observed that she seemed to have him wrapped around her finger, and he wanted to make her Miramax’s Grace Kelly. I reached out to Harvey Weinstein’s rep and he disputes Gwyneth’s characterization of their relationship as abusive. According to him, Gwyneth recommended Winona Ryder for Shakespeare in Love, although the director of the film, John Madden, said Gwyneth was the only person they wanted for Viola, so it doesn’t sound like Winona was ever really that much in contention. According to Harvey Weinstein through his rep, Gwyneth wanted her brother, Jake, to write and produce an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Weinstein had paid a lot of money to acquire those rights, and he ended up not going through with that project with her brother writing and directing. He said that contributed to a deterioration of their relationship, and he also said there was a financial element to it because his movies capped out at $25 million, and after she won her Oscar, she was earning $8 to $10 million. She was outpaced from working on indies, but she really thrived doing those movies.
What was the time in between Gwyneth winning her Oscar and launching Goop like?
After she won her Oscar, there was a brief period of glowing adulation. People were like, She’s inhumanly beautiful. She’s so talented. She deserved this Oscar. But then the press turned on her, and a lot of that did strike me as sexist. One of the things that seemed to really trigger people was this short blurb, not even like a full article, in the New York Times, about how she wore a very simple diamond choker to the Oscars, borrowed from Harry Winston. Her father went with her, and they’re sitting there looking at her, and Bruce thinks, “She’s so beautiful. I’m so proud of her. I’m going to buy her this necklace.” And it was $160,000 in 1999.
You draw a parallel toward the end of the book between Robert F. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again political agenda and Goop. Where do you think she fits into that world?
She gets asked about RFK Jr. in interviews, and she told the New York Times that she thinks “it was very interesting to hear his point of view.” Goop sewed distrust of Western medicine, established experts, and established science. Goop was publishing, for instance, an article suggesting that bras cause cancer, which is a claim that has been widely debunked. They would get a lot of traffic, then monetize those visitors by selling them products. I interviewed one public-health infectious-disease expert, who pointed out that the wellness industry and Gwyneth talk about toxins “but don’t talk about things like Gardasil [the HPV vaccine] or the hepatitis B vaccine.”
The wellness industry works by sewing distrust in established medicine. The medical industrial complex needs a lot of work, but the wellness industry now is valued at $6.3 trillion. The global pharmaceutical industry is at $1.6 trillion or $1.7 trillion. I think of it as “Big Wellness.”
The Terry Sanderson ski trial was such a coup for her. Why do you think that version of Gwyneth struck a chord with the public?
She is a member of the elite. It was a shocking juxtaposition. Is there a dowdier place than a courtroom in Utah? It was like seeing Gwyneth at the DMV. She looked great. And since they have the cameras in Utah, we got to see the whole thing. It was a jarring interaction between her and the normal world. [Sanderson] told me he regretted choosing his lawyer, who came through the insurance company.
Looking ahead to the Marty Supreme press tour, what do you think she’ll be like when it comes to another Oscar attempt, nearly 30 years since she won her first?
When she was on the Oscar press and awards circuit in the ’90s, Harvey Weinstein was the architect behind the modern awards campaigns. He would send his talent all over the world to have little cocktail hours. Someone who worked at Miramax said it was like having your wedding night every night. I would imagine that she knows what she’s getting herself into. I do think that the industry respects her talent, still. I think she’ll probably do “Actors on Actors” with Dakota Johnson, since she had The Materialists.
I was pretty shocked by how you reported that she sowed the seeds of Derek Blasberg’s poop scandal at dinner parties. What is her relationship like to tabloid culture now?
She knows how to manipulate the media.
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