Gwyneth Paltrow feels misunderstood
Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't think people will "understand" her until she is "dead" and she is baffled by her public image.
Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't think people will "understand" her until she is "dead".
The 52-year-old actress and wellness guru is baffled by the "narrative" surrounding her persona because she often has "no idea" why people have drawn
certain conclusions about her and she finds some aspects of her public image hurtful.
Speaking in a teaser clip for her appearance on The Cutting Room Floor podcast, she said: “No one will understand me until I’m dead.
“I have never created my own narrative. I’m aware that that exists.
“But I have had a really strange life in this respect. Like, imagine being an actual person and know that people are characterizing you in a way and you can’t understand how they arrived at that narrative. I have no idea who people are talking about.
"I’ve lived for many decades now with this avatar that’s, like, projected on very very strongly, and I don’t know why.
I know why, but these are like very tropey, reductive things that you could say about a lot of people and culture. And I also feel like I get distilled down to the most easy-to-understand trope. We’re all human beings, so it hurts when somebody willfully misrepresents you or misperceives you."
Although the Goop founder - who has two children with ex-husband Chris Martin and is married to Brad Falchuk - has been keen to correct people's misconceptions she is now trying to just move past worrying about her public image.
She added: "You want to say, ‘But this is not true,’ or, ‘I never said that,’ but lately I’ve been really trying to almost meditate on this idea of, if you could get to the stage where you could really let go of trying to correct misperception, what could that do?”
Gwyneth believes social media has changed the way members of the public relate to celebrities but she doesn't feel comfortable putting her life online.
She said: “So, in the 90s there was all this mystery around movie stars and that was sort of part of the machine, I think, in a lot of ways.
"In the olden days movie stars were supposed to be mysterious and you were given these tidbits about their lives and it was so exciting and titillating. And then that bred this whole tabloid thing that reached an apex before Instagram.
“Instagram kind of dismantled a lot of that business model. There was this pursuit of images and information to sort of humanise celebrities, and then we segued into this bizarre new media milieu where everybody was putting their life in front. But for me, because I’m introverted, it’s been uncomfortable.”
The Iron Man star wasn't "trained" to interact with fans on social media in the way other stars may have been, so sharing her life feels "counterintuitive".
She said: “It’s not intuitive. It’s very uncomfortable. But I understand from a marketing perspective how valuable that lever is and how, if you’re growing a CPG business, it’s very hard not to be a celebrity who is trying to leverage their celebrity without those channels.”
