The “disaster” movie that humiliated Gwyneth Paltrow: “It was so disturbing”
A star of indie cinema as well as some of the biggest Hollywood movies ever made, the American actor Gwyneth Paltrow has collaborated with some of the greatest directors of modern cinema, including Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kevin Smith, Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh. Rising to fame at the perfect time for the independent cinema movement at the tail-end of the 20th century, Paltrow had a hand in elevating American cinema as it headed into the new millennium.
One of her greatest triumphs is no doubt her work with Wes Anderson in the 2001 comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, a film thought to be one of the director’s all-time best. Appearing alongside the likes of other contemporary comic actors Ben Stiller, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson, Paltrow provides an excellent performance, standing out as Margot, who memorably arrives into the film ‘by way of the green line bus’.
Later that same year, however, Paltrow would star in a very different comedy flick, being cast alongside Jack Black in Shallow Hal, an outrageous fantasy film that would never see the light of day in this modern day and age. Telling the story of a shallow middle-aged man who falls in love with a 300-pound woman after being granted the power to see people’s inner beauty, the film was relatively well-received at the time despite its controversial subject matter.
Comedy was indeed far different back in the early 2000s, but Paltrow doesn’t look back fondly on the flick in which she was forced to wear a gigantic fat suit, calling the production a “disaster” during an interview with Netflix.
Conducting the interview alongside Kevin Keating, her “best friend”, when he is asked what he thinks Paltrow believes her least favourite performance is, he replies with Shallow Hal. “That was before your time,” she states, “See what happened? Disaster…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. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese”.
Continuing, she added: “For some reason the clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible. I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive”.
Paltrow managed to thrive following her disastrous role in the movie, taking a lucrative part in Disney’s Marvel franchise as Pepper Potts, making her series debut in the 2008 movie Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau. Roles in further instalments came thick and fast, becoming an unlikely favourite of the franchise after appearances in Iron Man 2, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Homecoming and more.
A little more recently, Paltrow has become known for her curious wellness and lifestyle company, ‘Goop’, which is responsible for several strange products, including a ‘Psychic vampire repellent spray’, ‘Sex Dust’ and a ‘24-carat gold £10,000 dildo’.
For now, we’ll take you back a few years to when Paltrow played Rosemary in 2001’s Shallow Hal, take a look at her comments toward the performance below.
