Gwyneth Paltrow is sitting at the head of a long table outside her office at Goop’s headquarters in Santa Monica, an environment done up in shades of gray and white where Sweetgreen abounds, and arrays of self-improvement books and organic snacks are organized with military precision. In shorts, a loose top, and bare feet, Paltrow is talking about how her kids, 15-year-old Apple and 13-year-old Moses (with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin), relate to her public persona.
“I think they understand fame very well,” she says. “My son said to me the other day [after] he was out with his best friend and his family, ‘Mom, people are so different when you’re not there.’ He was like, ‘Fame is a really strange thing.’” The 47-year-old Paltrow is a celebrity in the classic mold—her every gesture radiates movie star. But she is also a celebrity in the contemporary mode: a brand. Goop, which began in 2008 as a newsletter, has grown into a 250-person lifestyle empire that churns out a robust stream of content, including a twice-weekly podcast; hosts regular summits; has created fashion, beauty, and fragrance lines; and now has its own Netflix show.
The six-part series, The Goop Lab With Gwyneth Paltrow, functions almost as a Goop reality show. Paltrow, whose staff calls her “GP,” moderates each 30-minute episode, interviewing experts with Goop’s chief content officer, Elise Loehnen.
In one episode, four Goop employees travel to Jamaica for a “healing trip,” where they try psychedelics (magic mushrooms). At one point, Paltrow talks about having tried another mind-altering substance, MDMA, in Mexico with her now husband, Brad Falchuk, noting that she did not hallucinate but adding that she thinks “there’s so much to unearth” if she took it therapeutically.
“What could possibly be wrong with you?” Loehnen asks Paltrow. “You have everything. You’re beautiful. You’re wealthy. You’re famous.” Paltrow responds, “Being the person that people perceive me to be is inherently traumatic.”
The question of what Paltrow is really like has been central to the Goop brand—for both its fans and its detractors. She is sometimes painted as remote or out of touch; in person, she’s engaging, open, and quick-witted.
Paltrow grins slyly when I bring up the hubbub over her disclosure that she and Falchuk continued to live in separate residences for almost a year after they were married. (Falchuk, a successful writer and producer, also has two kids from a previous marriage.) The couple, who celebrated their first anniversary in September, moved in together last summer.
“So our sex life is over,” Paltrow jokes when I ask about their cohabitation. “I thought it was really interesting how resonant that was for people,” she says. “One of my best friends was like, ‘That is my dream. Don’t ever move in.’ I think it certainly helps with preserving mystery and also preserving the idea that this person has their own life. So this is something I’m trying to remain aware of now as we merge together.”
The pair met in 2010, and again a few years later, when Paltrow did guest spots on the TV series Glee, which Falchuk wrote for and coproduced with her friend Ryan Murphy. (The team also worked together on the Netflix series The Politician, in which Paltrow played a supporting role.)
Falchuk recalls getting to know Paltrow on the set. “She’s stunning and she’s charming and she’s completely disarming,” he says. “We had similar enough backgrounds—a little bit Jewish, a little bit East Coast, her dad was a TV producer—and so we just sort of developed this really lovely friendship.”
Falchuk says there are “many moments” each day when he’s reminded of the fact that he’s married to Gwyneth Paltrow. “There’s a public Gwyneth Paltrow, and there are all these ideas about who that is,” he explains. “And the reality is, the real Gwyneth Paltrow is so much more amazing, so much more than that, and that’s the one that I keep getting struck by and can’t believe I’m married to. All that curiosity and humility and non-judgment and desire for growth, and openness and excitement about the world. It’s like, well, when that’s your wife, how do you not have the same approach?”
Last summer, photos surfaced of Paltrow and Falchuk with ex-husband Martin, from whom Paltrow famously “consciously uncoupled” in 2014, and Martin’s girlfriend, Dakota Johnson, all palling around on the beach in the Hamptons. When I tell Paltrow that a number of friends DM’ed me that photo at the time, expressing a mixture of excitement, interest, and confusion, she laughs drily, and stresses that her dynamic with Martin continues to evolve. “It’s not like there’s a finish line: ‘Oh, we consciously uncoupled; we’re done.’ It’s a lifelong commitment to constantly reinvent your relationship with your ex, which you do presumably because you have children together. I don’t see a reason to do it if you don’t have children together. Some people do,” she says. “But I think we put all the hard work in at the beginning. I would say very rarely is it difficult now. We’ve learned how to communicate with each other. We love each other. We laugh. We have the best of each other. It’s really nice. It makes you feel like you don’t have to lose.”
Earlier, Paltrow showed me her Life360 app, which is similar to Find My Friends: The face of “Dad” (as in Martin) popped up on the map. In October, Paltrow even posted an Instagram tribute to Johnson on her 30th birthday. “I love her,” Paltrow says. “I can see how it would seem weird because it’s sort of unconventional. But I think, in this case, just having passed through it iteratively, I just adore her. I always start to think of the ampersand sign—what else can you bring in, instead of being resistant to or being made insecure by? There’s so much juice in leaning in to something like that.”
Paltrow remains tight with some of her ex-boyfriends too. “One of them is still one of my best friends—one from high school, Tony Woods,” she says. “And I’m friendly with Brad Pitt. I don’t have any really bad blood.”
Woods, who designs and builds townhouses in New York, remembers the origins of what would later become Paltrow’s more formalized wellness and recommendation efforts at Goop. “Gwyneth took me in 1993 to buy me my first bar of face soap, so I did get some of her ‘beauty guide’ before,” he says. “It was the Clinique with the slide-out case. She took me to the Sangertown Mall in upstate New York, and she wouldn’t even let me pretend it was for her.” Woods, who says he recently texted Paltrow a “question about infrared versus traditional saunas,” adds, “She’s an ongoing resource for physical and spiritual improvement.”
Another friend, Demi Moore, tells me that it’s Paltrow’s willingness to show vulnerability that people respond to. “In all that seems so perfect, part of her beauty is that she lets you see what’s imperfect,” Moore explains. “I think there’s a perception that she’s of privilege, and thereby it’s easy. It’s not easy because she comes from privilege. It’s easy because she does the work.”
Paltrow figures prominently in She Said, the new book by Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor about their reporting on the sexual abuse and harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein. She was one of the first women to go on the record with Twohey and Kantor about having been harassed by Weinstein.
Paltrow views the rise of the #MeToo movement as the breaking of a fault line. “It’s almost like it was the accumulation of so many years of this happening—and not to say that it doesn’t happen anymore because it still does, especially in companies where women don’t have a platform and there’s still a lot of fear and hierarchy and intimidation,” she says. “There’s still so much inequity all over the place. It sounds funny to say, but I’m sort of less familiar with it in the entertainment world. Also, I think I’ve reached the status in that world where no one’s going to fuck with me.”
To Paltrow, the discussions around harassment and gender inequality are still very much in their infancy. She cites the differences she’s noticed in questions directed at male and female executives. “Having gone to a lot of these summits and conferences, a question that I and other women get asked a lot is, ‘Do you have impostor syndrome?’ No man has ever been asked that on any panel that I’ve ever sat through. Not one time,” she says.
I ask Paltrow if she would ever have envisioned her transition to lifestyle and wellness impresario. She shakes her head. “I would have been totally baffled,” she explains.
There has been no shortage of mirth and fury surrounding Goop—including a $145,000 settlement in 2018 related to controversial claims about the prospective healing properties of jade eggs. But sentiment about the company seems to have stabilized. “Probably three years ago there was a bunch of negative stuff all the time, and in a situation like that when you have a couple of people really gunning for you…,” she says, trailing off. “But [now] it’s pretty great.”
Paltrow rarely acts these days, and neither of her kids has seen any of her films, save for the Iron Man movies. If Paltrow comes across one of her films herself, the reaction is visceral. “I vom,” she says. “I gag. I hate it.”
Does she ever feel like the acting bug might come back? “Literally never—nev-er,” she says. “When I was acting I really burned myself out. When the flywheel kicked in, I was doing three to five movies a year. I really got to the point where even the little things, like sitting in the van going to set, getting your makeup touch-ups, and everything—I really don’t know that I can bear it. The last movie I starred in, I was pregnant with my daughter. It was a movie called Proof, an adaptation of a play I did in London, and I was like, ‘I’ve had it. I can’t do this anymore.’ I had morning sickness and I was dying, and I had these five-page monologues. So when I had her, I knew I was going to take a big chunk of time off. And I’ve never starred in anything again.”
Paltrow, though, says she delights in coming across Instagram posts paying respect to her and ex-fiancé Pitt’s ’90s style. “I love it,” she says. “It’s just so funny to me because now my daughter looks at the ’90s the way I looked at the ’70s.” (Every year on Paltrow’s birthday, Apple posts a throwback photo of her mother on Instagram—“preferably with a cigarette,” Paltrow adds.)
Earlier in our conversation, I’d asked Paltrow why she decided not to take mushrooms with her team on The Goop Lab. “I just felt like I can’t be doing that on TV because God knows what’s going to happen,” she told me. “Having been a public person for such a long time, I’m quite guarded about my private life. At the same time there are a lot of things I’m very open about. I guess I would just want to be in control of my faculties when I’m on TV."
“I think I get more and more open as the years go on,” she continues. “I think that maybe comes in life when the degree to which you’re pretending to be someone else—or still hoping you’re going to be someone else—starts to diminish, and you’re like, ‘Here I am. Okay. So what?’”
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This article originally appears in the February 2020 issue of Harper's BAZAAR, available on newsstands January 21.
Hair: Teddy Charles for R+Co Haircare; Makeup: Georgie Eisdell for Goop Skincare; Manicure: Ashlie Johnson for Essie; Production: Zach Crawford at Crawford & Co Productions; Prop styling: Danielle Von Braun.
