Gwyneth Paltrow admits ‘privileged’ upbringing fuels lifelong criticism

Gwyneth Paltrow is well-aware of critics’ perception of her — and, according to the Academy Award-winning actress, they’re not entirely wrong. 

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Paltrow — who plays Kay Stone in Josh Safdie’s upcoming film “Marty Supreme” alongside Timothée Chalamet — spoke candidly about how her “privileged” upbringing has fed into years of criticism and explained how she works through the many misconceptions surrounding her reputation. 

When searching for the right actress to portray Stone, the film’s director told British Vogue that he was looking for a person “who was completely unreachable.”

“It must be a quality that I give off. I come from a very WASPy mother with Mayflower-ish roots, daughter of the American Revolution, all that kind of stuff,” said Paltrow, daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late TV director Bruce Paltrow, and goddaughter to Steven Spielberg. “So I think maybe epigenetically, there is some of that there. And I was a very privileged kid. I grew up on the Upper East Side, and I went to a great school and all the things. So some of the stuff that he sees, which is also the stuff I’ve been criticized for my whole life, is real.”

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Gwyneth Paltrow spoke candidly about how her “privileged” upbringing has fed into years of criticism.  (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Paltrow — who once told Harper’s Bazaar that it was “insanely traumatic” to be the person that people perceive her to be — said the perceptions of her are completely “misaligned.”

“I have so little say in the projections that people have, and it’s traumatic to be at the whim of these projections when it’s so misaligned with who you actually are,” she told THR. “Especially as an Enneagram 1 (a personality type characterized by a desire to be good), you’re like, ‘I never said that. I didn’t mean that. Stop using my life as clickbait.’ There’s just so much that can feel so unfair, and it feels like trauma. What I’ve been trying to get to recently is, is there any mechanism to not imbibe those misperceptions?”

Paltrow said she’s currently working through it in therapy.

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“My therapist talks about the evil shadow, which is the part of you where rage lives — the part of you that will burn the f—ng house down — and we do damage to ourselves by not embracing our shadows. When you close your eyes and get into evil shadow energy, there’s a freedom there, and I’m trying to experiment with that, because when I go into evil shadow energy, I don’t care what anyone’s misperception is.”

The actress is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late TV director Bruce Paltrow, and goddaughter of Steven Spielberg.  ( Emma McIntyre/FilmMagic)

“So, that’s my internal work these days. If somebody says something terrible that you read in a rag or whatever, instead of being like, “Hey, that’s not true, that’s not fair,” how about going into evil shadow energy and saying, “I don’t give a f—.”

The Academy Award-winning actress, who earned her breakthrough role in the 1998 classic, “Shakespeare In Love,” said she believes the “cultural obsession” with her personal life began circa 2008.

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“I think it really was when I sent out my first Goop newsletter [in 2008] … But this idea that I was challenging the way that people saw me or the box that I fit in and, remember, this is like pre- newsletters, pre-Instagram, pre-Substack, pre-, pre-, pre-. People were like, ‘What the f— is she doing? We don’t like this. This is weird.’ I challenged a very comfortable perception of who I was, and inherent in that was this idea that I want something else, which became, like, why does she want something more or something else?”

According to the BBC, in author Amy Odell’s “Gwyneth: The Biography,” Paltrow is described as “one of the most resented celebrities in the world.”

“She can be cold. She can be aloof. People compared her to Anna Wintour even, because she can be icy.”

— Amy Odell, author of ‘Gwyneth: The Biography’

Odell admitted that something that “fascinated” her is the Paltrow fans see on talk shows, is not the same “Gwyneth that a lot of” her sources saw. 

“She can be cold. She can be aloof. People compared her to Anna Wintour even, because she can be icy,” Odell, who spoke with 220 sources, told Etalk.

“She can be talking to somebody at a party or in the office and, if she doesn’t like that person, as soon as they turn around, sort of make a barf face to whoever is in the room with her,” Odell alleged. 

“But, she can also be incredibly charismatic when she has to have important meetings. Let’s say, she’s trying to raise money for Goop, and she’s meeting with venture capitalists. She can remember things to say in those meetings and recite them perfectly like she’s reciting lines from a script. So I thought it was really interesting how her acting experience and her experience, just like as a public figure, helped her a lot in her current role as the CEO of Goop.”

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Paltrow landed her role as Kay Stone in Josh Safdie’s upcoming film “Marty Supreme” due to her ability to be “unreachable” to people.  (James Devaney)

Odell also told the BBC that “it’s impossible to understand someone, as a biographer, if you don’t take the time to research where a subject came from, and how their parents impacted them.”

“I always make a big effort to interview people who knew a subject’s parents, and was fortunate to gain great insight into Gwyneth through those interviews. Gwyneth is a fascinating mix of both of her parents – she has her mother’s extraordinary acting talent and her dad’s (polarizing) personality and excellent aesthetic taste.”

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The Goop founder has learned to ignore the outside noise.  (Steven Ferdman)

Paltrow – who shares daughter Apple, 21, and son Moses, 19, with her ex-husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, and two adult stepchildren with husband Brad Falchuk, said if there’s anything she’s learned throughout the years, is to ignore the noise.

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And she hopes her children will do the same. 

“I spent so many years in pleasing mode, and what that means is you’re trying to bend yourself into some other idea of what somebody wants you to be. I just want them to be fully themselves and not give a f— what anybody thinks.