Gwyneth Paltrow spoke to Vanity Fair as part of a new cover story and pulled back the curtain a bit on her big return to acting later this year in Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme.” The A24 film stars Timothée Chalamet as a ping pong protégé competing overseas. Paltrow revealed for the first time she is starring as the wife of a rival professional who falls into bed with Chalamet’s star.
“This woman who is married to someone who is in the Ping-Pong mafia, as it were,” Paltrow explained. “They meet and she’s had a pretty tough life, and I think he breathes life back into her, but it’s kind of transactional for them both.”
“Marty Supreme” went viral during production after set paparazzi took photos of Chalamet and Paltrow making out while filming a scene. According to Paltrow, the two co-stars will be getting even more hot and heavy in the movie.
“I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow teased. “There’s a lot—a lot.”
Filming sex scenes with Chalamet introduced Paltrow to an intimacy coordinator for the first time, although she didn’t appear to need one after decades in Hollywood.
“There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” Paltrow said, noting that when “Marty Supreme’s” intimacy coordinator asked her if she’d be comfortable with a particular move during the filming of an intimate scene “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’ ”
“We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’ ” Paltrow added of not relying on an intimacy coordinator with Chalamet. “I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here,’ I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Paltrow joked that she cut right to the chase before filming sex scenes with Chalamet: “I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’ ”
The Oscar winner went on to refer to Chalamet as “a thinking man’s sex symbol,” adding to Vanity Fair: “He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid. He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.”
While Paltrow has played Pepper Potts in several Marvel movies and had a supporting role on the Netflix series “The Politician,” she’s viewing “Marty Supreme” as her first series acting role since 2010’s “Country Strong.” By serious she means that she’s “laying it all on the line and accessing a kind of vulnerability” that her role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe perhaps lacked (“it’s different when you’re reprising an Avengers thing,” she said).
Whether or not Paltrow could still pull off a vulnerable role fueled her self doubt, but she luckily had a famous friend who was also stepping back in front of the camera after more than a decade and who encouraged her. That would be Cameron Diaz, who ended an 11-year acting hiatus by starring in the Netflix movie “Back in Action” earlier this year.
“Cameron Diaz is one of my best friends, sorry to name-drop,” Paltrow said, adding that Diaz encouraged her to “think about the richness and the deepening of your life” as she returned to serious acting. “That’s all material…I’ve gone through a lot since the last time I was onscreen in a real way.”
“She’s a movie star. I say that in the cosmic sense. She’s got a gravitational pull that only a camera can depict,” Paltrow’s “Marty Supreme” director Josh Safdie said. “I think her absence from acting has lent a vulnerability to her abilities.”
A24 is set to release “Marty Supreme” in theaters on Dec. 25. Head over to Vanity Fair’s website to read Paltrow’s cover story in its entirety.
