Gwyneth Paltrow names her biggest career mistake: “I felt humiliated”
Acting is a tricky game. Any self-respecting actor dreams of building a reputation for picking only the finest roles in the finest films. Sadly, the nature of the film industry and the fundamental instability of the profession means that many actors end up sacrificing this lofty ideal and appearing in films they’d rather forget. Gwyneth Paltrow would know.
Born to revered producer-director Bruce Paltrow and Tony Award-winning actress Blythe Danner, Paltrow was always going to end up in the family business. She recieved early acting training from her parents in Massachusetts, where her father was working in summer stock productions. After dropping out of her Art History major at UC Santa Barbara, she made her film debut in 1991’s Shout and spent the next years or so appearing in various films, some of which were well-recieved, many of which were not.
In 1996, she hit new heights after starring as Emma Wodehouse in Emma, a project which led to her being cast as Viola in Shakespeare in Love, earning her a Golden Globe for Best Actress. She then went on to star in two brilliant films: The Talented Mr Ripley and The Royal Tennenbaums, and one not-so-brilliant film, 2001’s Shallow Hal, which marked a distinct change in her career trajectory.
Shallow Hal has not aged well. The film follows Jack Black’s character Hal, who, after heeding the advice of his misguided father, decides to start dating only the most beautiful women. His approach to romance is later interrogated by self-help guru Tony Robbins, who decides to hypnotise Hal into seeing women’s inner beauty, leading him to fall in love with the morbidly obese Rosemary – played by Paltrow.
The film has been accused of all sorts of failings, fatphobia being the most obvious. Paltrow’s friend and assistant Kevin Keating would later sit down for an interview with Netflix in which he was asked to guess her least favourite performance. “I would say it would be Shallow Hallow. I’m not sure who told you to do that one, but it wasn’t me. I wasn’t there working for you. Not around for that.” Paltrow clarified that the project was “before your time” before dubbing it a “disaster”.
The film is certainly an uncomfortable watch by today’s standards. Rosemary is, at one point, called a “rhino”, and there is a pervasive sense throughout that to be fat is to be inherently unloveable. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand and I walked through the lobby. It was so sad. It was so disturbing,” she said. “No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese. I felt humiliated. For some reason, the clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible,” she added. “I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive.”
