Gwyneth's huge task ahead

10 April 2012

I loved Gwyneth Paltrow the first time we met, when I was warned not to mention Brad Pitt, and she spent the entire interview cooing about him.

A couple of years later, not long before she won her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow was sombre, monosyllabic and verging on hostile. I'd heard a rumour that her father was battling throat cancer but, in public, she had only mentioned that her beloved grandfather was fading fast. It hardly made for a cheery interview.

Her grandfather died, her father survived, and Paltrow, who turns 30 in September, remains suspended in the media hoopla. "I feel as if my life has been a blur for the past six years. It's very difficult for me to have a real understanding of what's gone on and what it means. I am in denial about this whole side of my life."

I forget to ask where the Oscar is. Its location would probably speak volumes to a therapist about its owner's state of mind. Wherever it is, Paltrow says she's "still not enjoying it. It's funny. You want to have things like that happen but when they do, it poses a philosophical crisis. I was only 26 years old when I won the Oscar. What am I supposed to do for the rest of my life?"

It's easy to see how celebrities hang themselves with their own quotes, especially when they're of the "poor me" variety. Paltrow's comments could reek of spoiltbratishness. But then she continues about that "very, very hard time".

"My father was eating through a tube in his stomach, my grandfather - who I was so close to - was dying. That whole time from making The Talented Mr Ripley in Italy to finding out about my dad and grandfather, all the way through the Oscars ... it was really confusing and messy and sad. So the Oscar doesn't mean anything to me. I hope that one day I look at it and feel what people imagine I feel."

Perhaps this explains why Paltrow felt the urge to cast off her corset, literally and metaphorically, and strap on a fat suit for her new film Shallow Hal, due out next month.

Directed by the notoriously filthy humoured Farrelly Brothers, Shallow-Hal is not as funny as it should be, though it's well worth seeing for Paltrow and the fabulously indelicate Jack Black as the title character. Was her team - her agent and Miramax's Harvey Weinstein - happy with their golden girl's decision to go low-brow? "My agent was very supportive, and loved the idea of me doing this. And Harvey loves a movie that's loving of heavy people."

Not everyone in America felt the film was loving of heavy people, though Paltrow gets credit for really wearing a fat suit after Julia Roberts's in America's Sweethearts turned out to be a not-fat-at-all-suit. Paltrow really did skulk around a New York hotel lobby in the suit, by way of research, and was shocked at being ignored. Gwyneth Paltrow, of course, would never be ignored. "People would literally not make eye contact with me. It was so isolating."

She's back to her usual shape in The Royal Tenenbaums, released in the UK in March, in which she plays a chain-smoking playwright who falls for her stepbrother, played by her current beau Luke Wilson. Paltrow loves the film even though she describes her character as a "very complicated, dark, destructive person. The film required a lot from me."

Did she go through her own dark and gloomy period? "Absolutely. I try not to carry that through into adulthood." She credits her father for keeping her on the straight and narrow. He gave her a "drug talk" when she was 14. "He said to me, 'If you're at a party and there are kids doing drugs, and you want to do them, fine. But first let the other kids take them, and make sure nobody is crying or flipping out or jumping out the window. And if everybody is OK, and you want to do drugs, do them. And if you ever don't feel well or something goes wrong, call me. I will immediately come get you.' "

She says that talk "removed all mystery", so she just "never got into" anything. "Now I have a really clean diet. I don't drink liquor or coffee or eat sugar. I'm certainly not going to start doing drugs."

Her idea of cheating on her macrobiotic diet - which she says "Madonna got from me" - is eating (gasp) tomatoes. They're not macrobiotic because they're a nightshade." Sometimes she'll even have a papaya. Paltrow is just as particular about her men. "We have less choices than men. There are so few guys out there it seems. Or so many more better women." Paltrow's boys, though, have been very attractive, haven't they? "Yes, some of them. But the people I go out with - they can't just be good-looking. I mean, Ben Affleck for example. I don't think he's that good-looking. I mean, he's not really my type. But I really feel for his intelligence and his humour, more than what he looks like."

So what, besides looks, are on her list? "Someone who is kind, has integrity and is articulate. And has a good sense of humour, you know. Well educated. A nice family. The basics."

A recent magazine article had Paltrow saying she couldn't go more than six weeks without sex. She is mortified. "That's not what I said. I would never talk about sex in public. What I meant was, six weeks is my cut-off if I'm not going to marry that person."

Luke Wilson has shattered the six-week timeline. The Royal Tenenbaums fared slightly less well, being mostly passed over by the recent film-critic award announcements. Paltrow is not even nominated for a Golden Globe this year. But at least she won't have to worry about being sniped at in print. She was less than thrilled that the New York Post recently reported she had "gained all this weight", and is enraged by an article in W magazine which infers Liv Tyler is not the skinniest girl in town. "They were suggesting she wasn't thin enough. That disgusts me. She is one of the most talented and beautiful young working actresses." But then Paltrow confesses: "I never think I'm thin enough or toned enough or my boobs are big enough or whatever it is. We all carry around these things based on how society expects us to look."

Interestingly, Paltrow insisted on a bottom double for Shallow Hal even though there appears to be very little of her derri?re in the shots where she sports indecently short shorts. They are acceptable because she "was on the Stairmaster like 80 times a day" in preparation. "You have to see that this girl has a really tiny little butt."

What was wrong with Paltrow's own, ostensibly tiny butt? "I hate it. It's not my favourite part." The parts she really likes are her "shoulders, collarbone and this part, my neck.

"Show me the woman that loves her butt and I'll show you a weird person."

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