Gwyneth really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Just when you think she can’t outdo herself, here comes yet another interview in which she makes all kinds of crazy, contradictory proclamations from an alternate universe.
Let’s start with the headline from this profile in the online magazine Bustle.
Here’s Gwyneth dressed head-to-toe in sheer red, her Gucci bra and panties visible, her rear end in one photo thrust toward the camera with Kardashian-level vigor.
‘I will literally disappear from public life,’ Paltrow says of eventually selling Goop, the company she founded 15 years ago. ‘No one will see me ever again.’
Meghan Markle, gird yourself: You have a new rival in factitious, fatuous displays of humility.
Here are two actresses whose best performances are not on stage or screen but in the public sphere, pretending to suffer the spotlight they so desperately seek. Oh, the burdens of wealth and celebrity.
The agony of being the face of a brand you yourself have established, the inordinate pressures of being an aspirational figure when you are practically begging other women to look like, dress like and want to be you.
Meghan Markle’s not wearing that $5,390 Max Mara camel coat in 70-degree California weather for nothing now, is she?
Here’s Gwyneth dressed head-to-toe in sheer red, her Gucci bra and panties visible, her rear end in one photo thrust toward the camera with Kardashian-level vigor.
‘I will literally disappear from public life,’ Paltrow says of eventually selling Goop, the company she founded 15 years ago. ‘No one will see me ever again.’
Anyway, back to Gwyneth. Despite having spent the bulk of her adult life as a red carpet figure who accepted InStyle’s award for Style Icon in 2015 — wearing Schiaparelli couture, no less — Gwyneth hates getting dressed up and having her picture taken, just hates it.
Here she is to Bustle on being the model for Goop’s clothing label and starring in social media posts:
‘I’m deeply uncomfortable,’ she says of being on camera, ‘but I do my best.’
This profile is accompanied by 15 portraits of Gwyneth in various states of undress. A Gwyneth who is beaming and preening, who presents here as the one-percent of 51-year-old American women with the money and means to look this good.
Yet has the gall to tell the reader — her ostensible customer — that she has come to accept losing all her looks.
‘I am constantly in this exercise of . . . embracing this painful thing of not being young and beautiful,’ Gwyneth says. ‘Sometimes I almost think of it as a person that I’m hugging, like, ‘This is supposed to happen. This is OK.’
Yes, let’s all sympathize as we look at these portraits of Gwyneth looking ecstatically at herself in a mirror as she applies red lipstick. As she poses suggestively in her underwear and six-inch Louboutin heels. Who is she kidding?
She has the temerity to show her bare midriff, toned and muscled with a seeming vertical line bisecting her abdomen, then claim that her two pregnancies have left her stomach falling apart.
‘I’m bummed that my stomach is . . . I had two babies and now, for some reason, at 51, it’s like all the elasticity’s going. But if I look at a 28-year-old model on Instagram and think my stomach’s supposed to look like that, I’ll just go into a depression.’
Reader, we can see Gwyneth’s ribcage here. We can practically count the bones.
Whither the Gwyneth who said, ‘I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year’?
Meghan Markle , gird yourself: You have a new rival in factitious, fatuous displays of humility.
A Gwyneth who is beaming and preening, who presents here as the one-percent of 51-year-old American women with the money and means to look this good.Â
At least that Gwyneth felt honest. An elitist, insufferable snob, yes, but an honest one.
Here though, we have a Gwyneth who is actively trying to court the woman who makes $25,000 a year. The point of this interview, don’t you know, is to plug her new, lower-priced Goop skincare line through — gasp! — Amazon and Target.
Now, if you think this is meant to bring Goop to the masses, don’t be silly.
‘I just didn’t approach it like . . . ‘Let’s go mass,’ Gwyneth says.
What other reason could there be? It’s a tautology: You go mass-market to reach the mass-market.
Wow. This is perhaps the most bonkers, out-of-touch celebrity profile since Meghan Markle told her interlocutor to describe her as non-verbal.
Because it never gets old, here was our duchess — currently hoping to give Gwyneth a run for her money by relaunching her lifestyle website site The Tig — in The Cut last year:
‘At one point in our conversation,’ interviewer Alison P. Davis writes, ‘instead of answering a question, [Meghan] will suggest how I might transcribe the noises she’s making: ‘She’s making these guttural sounds, and I can’t quite articulate what it is she’s feeling in that moment because she has no word for it; she’s just moaning’.’
Gwyneth has joined Meghan in a full-on detachment from reality.
Once engaged to Brad Pitt and the ex-wife of Chris Martin, a millionaire many, many times over thanks to Coldplay, Gwyneth says here that, ‘I could never get attracted to the really rich guy.’
Here though, we have a Gwyneth who is actively trying to court the woman who makes $25,000 a year. The point of this interview, don’t you know, is to plug her new, lower-priced Goop skincare line through — gasp! — Amazon and Target.
Here she is to Bustle on being the model for Goop’s clothing label and starring in social media posts: ‘I’m deeply uncomfortable,’ she says of being on camera, ‘but I do my best.’
An actress best known to generations of moviegoers for her role opposite Robert Downey Jr. in the ‘Iron Man’ franchise: ‘I’ve always done independent films. Money has never been my thing. It’s never been my driver.’
Strewn throughout is one of my favorite tics in a celebrity profile: the unnecessary use of big words, especially ones meant to evoke business school: When Gwyneth was getting divorced, she says, she didn’t just talk to her friends — she embarked on ‘data collection.’
She and her team didn’t think about doing a lower-priced line; it was something they ‘ideated.’ Her serums and lotions just don’t work; they’re ‘efficacious.’
There’s an unjustified shot at ‘the patriarchy’ for the pressure women feel, she says, to be busy all the time, as well as the term ‘nepo baby.’
‘Nobody rips on a kid who’s like, ‘I want to be a doctor like my dad and grandad,’ she gripes.
Well, no, because to become a doctor one must pass exams and do residencies and, you know, prove oneself as smart enough to be trusted with human life. But let’s mourn for the children of Malibu, with their modeling gigs and influencer deals, spared the rigors of the meritocracy.
Her kids, privileged though they are, understand how hard Gwyneth works.
‘I was saying this to my son, actually, the other day, because he was like, ‘I have so much to do.’ I said, ‘I so relate to you.’ I said, ‘Today I had to go and do a photo shoot for G. label all day, and I was the model.’
Her son is 17.
And those moms out there working three jobs and struggling to afford child care — well, they can’t relate, but Gwynnie is hoping you’ll try her new Goop treatments priced for the poor people out there — the $24.99 eye serum or the $19.99 glycolic acid toner.
It seems she’s seen the light: Poor and working class women deserve good skin too!
‘I was saying this to my son, actually, the other day, because he was like, ‘I have so much to do.’ I said, ‘I so relate to you.’ I said, ‘Today I had to go and do a photo shoot for G. label all day, and I was the model.’ (Above, right) Moses Martin
Of all the howlers in this interview, here’s one that hasn’t gotten much pick-up: Gwyneth Paltrow, whose brand relies on online engagement, who has been a pop-cultural figure for her entire adult life, has never seen the interview Harry and Meghan did with Oprah.
She swears.
‘Do you know,’ she says here, ‘I’m the only person in America that did not see that interview?’
She still hasn’t, she says, because Googling something is apparently beyond her capabilities.
‘I didn’t watch it at the time, and now I can’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where to find it.’
Maybe Gwyneth and Meghan, now neighbors in Montecito, could join forces. Meghan, after all, had no idea who Prince Harry was when she met him!
They have so much in common: Gwyneth and Meghan know so little yet want to guide us. They don’t care about money but want us to literally buy what they’re selling. They’re all about transparency even though — well, actually, that may be the only true claim they have.
After all, we can see right through them.
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