The two movies Gwyneth Paltrow admitted were “shite”
Despite experiencing plenty of success and winning an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy along the way, Gwyneth Paltrow ended up falling out of love with acting. This resulted in a significant reduction in her output in favour of focusing on outside business ventures.
Dating back to 2008, she’s only appeared in ten live-action narrative features, and seven of them saw her playing Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even on the small screen, her only recurring role during that period came on the Netflix series The Politician, which she admitted was entirely down to her husband, Brad Falchuk, who served as co-creator.
Although she hasn’t technically retired, Paltrow has nonetheless reiterated on several occasions that she doesn’t have much interest in returning to the world of cinema. However, long-time friend and co-star Robert Downey Jr. has been named as the one person who might be able to convince her otherwise.
Even at the peak of her professional career, Paltrow was cognisant enough to know that not every project she signed onto was destined to be a winner. In fact, in an interview with The Guardian, she definitively separated her filmography into ones she did for love and others she did for money, with the latter camp being branded as “shite”.
The Farrelly brothers’ Shallow Hal and Bruno Barreto’s abysmal View from the Top are singled out as being part of the “shite” section, with the latter a film “that Harvey Weinstein talked me into doing”. It was truly an awful thing, but at least Paltrow was fully aware of it.
“The worst movie ever,” she admitted. “Oh, it’s horrible.”
As for Shallow Hal, Paltrow has voiced her regret over the comedy. It required her to wear a fat suit in order to convince Jack Black’s title character that love truly is in the eye of the beholder after he gets hypnotised by a life coach in an elevator and suddenly sees people for who they are on the inside.
“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. I felt humiliated,” she explained. “For some reason, the clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible. I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive.”
While that’s hardly the most sensitive way of voicing regret for a film she called a “disaster”, it’s the sort of concept that wouldn’t make it to the screen today. It was a relatively big hit at the box office after releasing it in November 2001, though. Still, Paltrow doesn’t exactly recall it as being the greatest experience of her time in the Hollywood spotlight.
