When Gwyneth Paltrow cut 50% Ruth Jones’ lines for no reason: “It’s heartbreaking”
Gwyneth Paltrow has always been a rather strange example of celebrity. Born into a rich family with an actor mother – Blythe Danner – she found it easy to land opportunities as a budding star herself, quickly rising to fame in the 1990s.
While she has appeared in many successful movies and even won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow is more known for her bizarre out-of-touch persona; it’s like she’s a parody of a celebrity at times, saying things that leave you baffled. Only someone who has lived such a life of privilege could spout some of the opinions that Paltrow has over the years.
Calling her daughter Apple was bad enough, before “consciously uncoupling” from Coldplay’s Chris Martin, but then there’s Goop, her wellness site, which offers advice, vagina-scented candles, and $800 cardigans. When you reach a certain level of fame, it seems like you really can do absolutely anything.
“I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin,” she once said. “It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu,” is another corker. Clearly, Paltrow isn’t as perfect as she makes out, but nonetheless, she’s got the kind of attitude that only comes with living a life without an ounce of struggle. She lives in a Paltrow dreamland, not even flinching if people criticise her out-of-touchness.
Perhaps that’s a nice way to live if you can afford to be like that, but Paltrow certainly has let her privilege cloud her vision before, like when she demanded an actor’s lines be cut for no reason. She couldn’t even see that her demands would have a significant effect on the actor she was screwing over – or maybe she did and she just didn’t care.
It was during the filming of Emma that this took place, and a young Ruth Jones, who would soon become better known as Nessa on Gavin & Stacey, bore the brunt of Paltrow’s diva-ish behaviour. The Welsh actor had landed a small part as a maid in the Jane Austen adaptation, in which Paltrow had been cast in the leading role as the perfectly privileged, matchmaking blonde.
Coming at the height of Austen adaptation fever, Emma was a success, but Jones was disappointed when her already small role was made even smaller for no reason, all because of Paltrow. “I had two lines. I had to announce Gwyneth Paltrow and say, ‘Miss Woodhouse is here’. And then I had to say ‘Goodbye Miss Woodhouse’ at the exit and let her out,” Jones said on the Brydon & podcast.
This was Jones’ first-ever movie role, and she was delighted to be sharing the screen with Hollywood stars – that’s until she realised that they didn’t care about her at all. “She said, ‘Does she really need to say that, can I just come in?’” Jones revealed. “Imagine this for people who are starting out? You’ve got two lines, and someone cut 50% of your script. It’s heartbreaking.”
So, for no reason at all, Paltrow decided that Jones had too many lines, even though she hardly had any at all. There’s no explanation for such an unnecessary decision, and it certainly tainted Jones’ experience of working on a Hollywood film – something she never returned to, instead sticking to the realm of British film and TV.
