Why Gwyneth Paltrow’s comeback role nearly didn’t happen

Gwyneth Paltrow walks onto the stage. She stands with her back to the audience. She takes a breath and the audience applauds. A look of relief sweeps over her face. She can do this.

It’s a scene from Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie’s chaotically compelling ping-pong drama led by Timothée Chalamet (yes, all those words do go together), in which Paltrow’s character, Kay Stone, returns to the stage after a decade or so in retirement.

It’s a neat parallel – and a big wink – to Paltrow’s real-life situation, as Marty Supreme has been hailed as her comeback after more than six years away. So that look? That relief? It’s kind of real.

“When you decide to step away from something for a number of years, it’s not a guarantee that someone’s going to hold your place, you know?” says Paltrow. “And I just felt very grateful that when I decided to step my foot back into this, that there’s just been a very warm reception.”

It’s early December and Paltrow is speaking over Zoom. It’s weirdly gobsmacking when she appears on screen – it’s Gwyneth Paltrow! – even more so when she compliments me on my top and notes that we’re both wearing black and white – “Love it” – and I mumble back something about my stripes being Gwyneth-approved (less so my unbrushed 7am hair).

She is on a charm and interview offensive for the film, a critical hit for which The Hollywood Reporter believes she has a good shot at an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Through all of her interviews over the last couple of months the narrative has been the same: this is her comeback.

To be clear, it’s not that she hasn’t done any acting – there was her husband Brad Falchuk’s 2019 Netflix series The Politician – but none of it really matched her heady early days, when she pumped out 15 films in five years and scooped an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1999.

Yes, there had been Marvel movies – three Iron Mans, three Avengers and a Spider-Man – but there were very few indies, period dramas or rom-coms, all of which had been the bedrock of a prolific early career.

Instead, she became less Paltrow the Movie Star and more Paltrow the Personality. Her wellness and lifestyle brand Goop kept her in the public eye (her ability to generate headlines with items such as vaginal “eggs” and a candle that smelt like, yes, her vagina, is unmatched), while her “conscious uncoupling” from Coldplay’s Chris Martin rewrote the rules around celebrity divorce.

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More recently, she made headlines for her ultra-luxe wardrobe during a court case in which a retired optometrist claimed Paltrow caused a collision on a Utah ski field (a jury found her innocent). There was also an unauthorised biography last year by journalist Amy Odell with enough juicy details (Ben! Brad!) from more than 200 interviews with everyone but Paltrow to keep celebrity watchers agog. (Paltrow responded by calling Odell a “hack”, telling British Vogue the book was “full of rubbish”.)

Now, like a perfectly timed ping-pong serve, Marty Supreme has come along to redirect the conversation. The film is a throwback to Paltrow’s early days – an ambitious indie with a sprawling cast, a hot lead actor and a director with a singular vision and style. Paltrow is terrific – a steady hand that Chalamet hyperactively bounces off – but it almost didn’t happen.

Paltrow had not heard of Safdie. Had not watched one Chalamet movie.

“I actually had dinner with my managers in LA last night, and they were making fun of me,” she says. “Because they went back to their texts when they first told me about this film: ‘Will you meet this guy [Safdie]?’ And I didn’t know who he was. I was so, kind of, out of the world of cinema for the past couple of years, like focused on other things. And so embarrassingly, I didn’t know who he was. I had never seen Timmy in a film and I know it’s crazy.

“And my brother [Jake], who’s a filmmaker, he was like, ‘You have to, whatever this is, I’m telling you, Josh Safdie is the most brilliant filmmaker working today. You have to say yes, no matter what it is’.”

Safdie, who has had a breakout few years with the indie hits Uncut Gems and Good Time, both of which he directed with his brother Benny, had written the part especially for Paltrow, just as he had written Marty Mauser for Chalamet. It was a punt that paid off. Paltrow was stunned.

“It was so crazy and ambitious,” she says. “And I thought, ‘My god, how is he going to pull this off?’ It was really long (two hours and 29 minutes) and I just thought, ‘God, these characters are so complicated and I think audiences are going to be like, ‘Do we like these people? Is there redemption?’

“I was just fascinated by it, because it didn’t read like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a piece of cake.’ It was really ambitious. And I love a challenge. And my kids had just all flown the coop and had gone to college. And I thought, ‘OK, why not?’ I’ll say yes and give it a whirl. And I’m really glad I did.”

Did she feel any awkwardness in playing someone who could so easily be identified as her?

“There were definitely aspects where I thought, OK, you know, when I say this one line like – ‘Oh, I bet you don’t know who I am’ or ‘I bet you’ve never seen any of my movies because I quit acting before you were born’ – and I thought… there’s probably some kids out there that that’s true for and then here I was coming back,” she says.

“But when I approach a role, I’m looking for the similarities to help build the foundation, and then I’m looking for all of the differences to see how I’ll be able to creatively fill those in. And, you know, we definitely had some aspects … in common.”

For Safdie, Paltrow was always the one.

“The character of Kay is an untouchable beacon of elegance and grace and gentility,” he says. “She [Paltrow] also was somebody who hadn’t been acting in a long time, and she seemed to be someone who was in hiding. She was pursuing, obviously, a huge dream in Goop, which she’s realised, and there was a vulnerability that I sensed in her that would be really perfect for the part.

“There was this feeling that I had from when I was a kid, when I was a teenager – you know, forget about the fact that she’s worked with some of the great auteurs, like PTA [Paul Thomas Anderson] and Wes Anderson and David Fincher – but it was films like Great Expectations, The Talented Mr Ripley, A Perfect Murder, and Shakespeare in Love, to some extent, it was those films that she was this icon of wealth and elegance and unreachability and grace, and this character had to exude that before they opened their mouth.”

It sounds like you had a crush on her…

“Of course, I did,” he says, laughing. “She was someone who you felt like you couldn’t even get to. There was such a softness to her, but she was also so heavy that I wouldn’t, couldn’t call it a crush. But when I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, I think I was a senior in high school, that was the one where I, like, had a full on crush for her.”

When they first met, though, Paltrow pulled what Safdie calls “a Hollywood move” on him.

“I show up at the house, pull up, unassuming, and at first you go in and they say, ‘Oh, Gwyneth will be in in a second,’” Safdie recalls. “You sit down in exactly the type of house you think that Gwyneth would live in, super tasteful and chic, and then she walks in, and in the room, all of a sudden, the lights turn on, and you talk to her …

“And she really, really responded. I could tell she was responding. And her assistant came in and said, ‘Your 1.30 is here, should I tell him to wait? Or do you want me to push it?’ She’s gonna tell him to wait. And I knew that’s a Hollywood move. I knew there was no 1.30, it was a safeguard. So she pushed it once, then she pushed it twice, and by the third time I was like, ‘All right, I made some sort of progress.’”

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In Marty Supreme, Paltrow’s Kay Stone is a picture of 1950s elegance. A retired movie star stuck in a loveless marriage to a business tycoon, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), she sees in Marty an escape from the confines of a predictable life.

“She has an electric sadness to her,” says Safdie of Kay. “She recognises herself in him. Marty awakens a dream inside of her. The problem is, when you try to reactivate a dream, it’s a nightmare.”

The heat between Paltrow and Chalamet (whose performance has so far won him the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards) is one of the film’s big surprises – and proof of Safdie’s knack with casting on multiple levels. He didn’t just bring two movie stars of different generations together – Paltrow is 53 and Chalamet is 30 – he united two people who would have a unique understanding of the type of scrutiny and weird pressure that comes with the job.

“You’re playing matchmaker,” says Safdie. “I knew that Timmy was going to revere Gwyneth because she was this movie star, and he was just arriving at stardom and in a really intense way. And here’s this veteran of the game.

“I had him actually meet her [for the first time] on a screen test and it was magical, because I said to him, ‘No words, just circle her and try to understand her.’ And then she did the same to him. And, you know, sometimes it [chemistry] doesn’t work and that’s when directing gets a little harder and the performances get harder. But I just had a feeling that that was going to work.”

In fact, it worked so well that when paparazzi photos of Chalamet and Paltrow kissing on set went viral in October 2024, it caused a frenzy.

For Paltrow it was a reminder of her younger years, when she was relentlessly pursued by photographers and the media.

“When you are pursued like that as a young person, there’s something inherently very unnatural about that, right?” says Paltrow. “It’s like we’re supposed to be in a society all together, doing our things, but it’s very weird to be singled out like that and to have that much energy directed towards you, [have] that many things written about you – negative, positive – and when you’re young, it’s a lot to hold and I think it’s shaped me in a certain sense.

“I think it’s made me understand the illusion of fame. It’s made me understand the projection of fame. It’s so intense, I can’t imagine what I would be like had I taken a completely different path, because it’s been such a part of my development, you know, reacting to all that stuff and holding all that stuff.”

Does she think Hollywood has changed for the better since then? Especially the way stars are able to manage their profile?

“I don’t know if it’s for the better,” says Paltrow. “I think it’s utterly fascinating. It’s incredible to see how media-savvy these young artists are, and how it seems like this integral part of your success story is understanding how to manage press and people and public perceptions.

“I’m so impressed when I’ve been watching Timothée’s genius marketing around this film and just thinking, my god, to have that level of strategy, because they’ve all grown up with social media, and, of course, we didn’t. It was a completely different model, and it was actually a model of mystery, and now it’s all flipped on its head. So I feel like a student here. It’s masterful to watch this generation and how they’re able to get across their art or their product.”

As for her impact on culture – from that Sliding Doors haircut (I tried it, it didn’t work) to her ’90s Calvin Klein slip dresses that are now back in fashion to her early adoption of newsletters (pre-pre-Substack) for Goop – is she the type of person who looks back?

“I do not do that,” she says. “But sometimes I will say, you know, transparently, sometimes when people come up to me and they’ll say, ‘Thank you so much for introducing X into the culture’ – I mean, any number of things – and I think, ‘Oh, it’s so nice when I look in someone’s eyes and I can see that I did help them make a connection in some way to something valuable. And I really do feel that when it happens.”

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Marty Supreme is in cinemas from January 22.

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