Gwyneth Paltrow on Motherhood, MAHA, Meghan Markle, Making Out With Timothée Chalamet—and Much More

High in the hills of Montecito, up beyond Oprah’s gates and Harry and Meghan’s gates and an endless sprawl of privacy hedges, Gwyneth Paltrow is making coffee in her kitchen. You know the one. A kitchen that, when Architectural Digest unveiled it in a home tour in 2022, virally eclipsed the entire Nancy Meyers canon as the bougie platonic ideal. The Mediterranean-blue plates lining a wall. The marble-topped island range, where Paltrow lovingly concocts Instagram-famous “boyfriend breakfasts” for her husband of six years, TV producer Brad Falchuk. The room is bathed in natural California light and almost eerily quiet because, as we also know, her children with ex-husband Chris Martin, Apple, 20, and Moses, 18, are off at college.

“I’m Gwyneth,” she says by way of introduction, and of course she is.

Paltrow wears a greige cardigan, white wide-leg jeans, shearling-lined clogs, and no apparent makeup. (Stealth wealth, which we’ll get to in a bit.) At 52 she looks refreshingly like herself, with flaxen hair and vintage Noxzema-commercial skin. Unlike many of her contemporaries (not to mention much younger stars), she hasn’t plumped her subtle fine lines or her lips into the atmosphere.

Paltrow’s reputation—her iconography, over three decades—looms to a ridiculous degree. She’s the nostalgic ’90s waif and pixied Pitt (and Affleck) paramour the paparazzi, then the internet, never got over; the weeping Oscar winner turned woo-woo Goop guru. But here in her kitchen at 8 a.m. on this given Thursday, Paltrow is a mortal woman in the middle of a not-super-Goopy routine. She woke up before 6 and checked her email in the dark. Though she stocks almond, hemp, and macadamia milks for guests (we’ll get to the raw milk of it all too), the wellness maven takes her own coffee with a splash of heavy cream. (Dairy credit: Clover Sonoma organic, I think.) And her group chat is blowing up.

“Our friend Demi got nominated,” Paltrow beams as a screenshot pops up on her laptop showing her, a bespectacled Demi Moore, podcaster–slash–Nobody Wants This producer Sara Foster, and jewelry designer Jennifer Meyer with mouths agape on FaceTime this morning, which happens to be Oscar nomination day, celebrating Moore’s nod for The Substance. Seeing Moore get her due at 62, for a role about a woman’s worth in their ageist industry—“It’s so fucking rad what’s happening,” Paltrow purrs.

“There’s this weird, deep grief that comes with letting go, saying goodbye, and then calling into question your own purpose,” Paltrow says. “Who am I now?”

Paltrow quit Hollywood before it could even think of quitting her, but now she, too, is poised for the radness of a comeback. She’s emerging from soft retirement with her first substantial film role in 15 years in director Josh Safdie’s period Ping-Pong romp Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as the titular 1950s hustler and Paltrow’s sidepiece, which has been teased in a passionate makeout scene rippling online. Rumors are brewing about a Venice Film Festival premiere late this summer (though studio A24 says the chatter is not accurate). Cinephiles are already frothing over Marty’s Christmas Day release, a marquee date for awards contenders.

“She’s a movie star. I say that in the cosmic sense. She’s got a gravitational pull that only a camera can depict,” says Safdie. “I think her absence from acting has lent a vulnerability to her abilities.” It doesn’t seem like posturing when Paltrow tells me she was nervous—really nervous—to return. She counts 2010’s Country Strong as the last movie in which she was “laying it all on the line and accessing a kind of vulnerability.” With all due respect to Pepper Potts and the Marvel universe, “it’s different when you’re reprising an Avengers thing.” Plagued by self-doubt, Paltrow turned to one of the few other Hollywood heavyweights who peaced in her prime. “Cameron Diaz is one of my best friends, sorry to name-drop,” she grins. Diaz, who’d already unretired for the Netflix thrill ride Back in Action, encouraged her to “think about the richness and the deepening of your life,” Paltrow recalls. “That’s all material.”

She considers it, sipping her creamed coffee: “I’ve gone through a lot since the last time I was onscreen in a real way.”

Paltrow is reentering Hollywood while she juggles being the embattled CEO of her intrepid lifestyle company, Goop, determined to refocus her corporate baby in the wake of layoffs last fall and headlines that seemed to revel in the reorganization. And after dedicating herself to motherhood since Apple’s birth in 2004, she’s contending with the disorienting sadness and newfound freedom of her children leaving their Brentwood nest, a former equestrian estate she listed last June and was in the process of selling before the wildfires ravaged her hometown—the movers are en route to Montecito as we speak. (Days later, news broke of the $22 million sale.) Plus, “I’m going through hard-core perimenopause,” Paltrow notes, “which doesn’t help.”

Whatever we think we know about her, Paltrow is only just beginning to understand this knotty new chapter herself.

“Gwyneth is a supermom and she was generally extremely happy when the kids were growing up,” says Falchuk. “She has room to feel herself now. To have her own needs and experiences and moods. And she is loving it. It’s really fun to be around.”

“There’s this weird, deep grief that comes with letting go, saying goodbye, and then calling into question your own purpose” is how Paltrow puts it. She’s talking about empty nesting, but the same could apply to her state of personal and professional flux. “Who am I now?”

Only Gwyneth could dip back into filmmaking after a lengthy hiatus and immediately find herself making out with the internet’s boyfriend. (Film-frenching the man of the moment is a long-standing gift, from Brad Pitt in Se7en to golden boy Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley.) Last fall, paparazzi footage from Marty Supreme’s New York set revealed a mustachioed Chalamet, a couple decades her junior, spontaneously grabbing Paltrow, decked in diamonds and a dramatic red gown, and kissing her senseless in Central Park. Unto us Gwynothée was born.

That viral scene is but foreplay, she reveals. “I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow teases with twinkly amusement. “There’s a lot—a lot.”

“So…you’re in a lot of vulnerable positions with him?” I try, unsuccessfully, not to laugh.

“Beyond,” Paltrow replies.

Marty Supreme, A24 wonder Safdie’s follow-up to 2019’s Uncut Gems, has been cloaked in intrigue, though it sounds like a fictionalized take on a real-life Ping-Pong champion named Marty Reisman. (A24 says it’s “not actually based on him.”) The colorful cast includes Tyler, the Creator; Fran Drescher; and Sandra Bernhard. Paltrow cracks the cone of silence at her farm table overlooking a lush, hedged garden, revealing that she plays a table tennis WAG: “This woman who is married to someone who is in the Ping-Pong mafia, as it were” and becomes entangled with Chalamet’s Marty. “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.” Safdie says that Paltrow’s break from acting happened to be “deeply connected to the part she plays,” adding, somewhat cryptically, “Driving to her house on a Wednesday morning felt written!”

When Paltrow left acting, she really left—so much so that she says she’d never seen Uncut Gems or watched a Chalamet movie, though her kids are fans of her costar. In contrast to the brawny Tom Cruises of Paltrow’s youth, “he’s such a thinking man’s sex symbol,” she says of Chalamet. “He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid,” but Paltrow corrects herself. “He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.”

Which brings us back to the copious amounts of onscreen sex, which has changed since the days of peak Paltrow. “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” she says. When Marty Supreme’s intimacy coordinator asked Paltrow if she’d be okay with a particular move, “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’ ”

Paltrow laughs lightly, but in fact she’s part of the reason behind the shift. Intimacy coordinators rose to prominence after the #MeToo movement revealed the extent of sexual abuse in Hollywood. As a former Miramax darling, Paltrow lent her prominent voice to the reckoning in 2017, alleging in The New York Times that Harvey Weinstein made sexual advances on her in his hotel suite when she was 22 and on the cusp of filming her first starring role, in Emma.

When I ask Paltrow if #MeToo succeeded in changing the industry, she answers with an optimistic but equivocal “I think so.” For one, “there are no meetings set up in hotel rooms, from what I understand, or if there are, it’s multiple people in the room. That bubble has definitely burst,” she nods. “I’m sure people still abuse power in Hollywood because they do everywhere, but it has definitely changed.”

Incidentally, Gwynothée all but waved off their intimacy coordinator, a choice actors are free to make. “We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,’ ” Paltrow recalls. “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’ ”—she lays a milky-manicured hand on her own shoulder—“I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.” She mostly shrugs at simulating all of that sex with Chalamet: “I was like, ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’ ”

Paltrow still seems to be holding Hollywood at a safe distance. “I get approached, still, surprisingly a lot, and I say no,” she explains with an admirable lack of coyness. That she’s back at all is mostly because her brother, Jake Paltrow, a filmmaker and Safdie fan, urged her to do Marty Supreme and, for the first time in a long time, she felt free to.

Mixing motherhood and movies—especially the kind that required long shoots abroad—did not appeal to Paltrow. “I didn’t even contemplate doing anything that would take me away from my kids,” she tells me. No judgment to working parents, “but I’ve always sort of understood how finite this period of childhood is.”

Paltrow’s upbringing informed her approach to parenting. She’s not a fan of the term “nepo baby,” but as fans and haters know, Paltrow followed her mother, actor Blythe Danner, and her father, the late TV director-producer Bruce Paltrow, into the business. (Pop-up Paltrow factoid: Her godfather is Steven Spielberg, who cast her as young Wendy in Hook.) Paltrow, who moved from LA to New York when she was 11, says, “My parents traveled a lot for work when I was young, which they had to, but I think it was sometimes hard for my brother and me.”

By the late 1990s, Paltrow had spawned a strain of disdain that would, years later, mutate into Hatha hate: the particular public annoyance at a woman accused of being cloyingly sincere, caught in the act of trying and, ugh, effectively succeeding.

“Sometimes you overcorrect from your childhood stuff,” she continues, “and I just wanted to be home as much as possible.” Her children and stepchildren—Isabella, 20, and Brody, 19—factored into her comeback, she jokes with evil-genius vibes, as Marty’s New York shoot meant East Coast proximity to Apple at Vanderbilt, Moses at Brown, Isabella at Cornell, and Brody at Yale.

For years Paltrow starred in a heady mix of awards bait (Shakespeare in Love), cultishly loved rom-coms (Sliding Doors), less enduring rom-coms (Shallow Hal), karaoke musicals (Duets), and the occasional sci-fi adventure (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). The churn depleted her, physically and emotionally: “I was really disenchanted with how I was treated for a lot of it,” including “the disparity between male costars and all that, which now sounds cliché, but it’s really true and it’s hard to live.”

She still remembers a grueling film shoot in the English countryside. Naive to labor protections, Paltrow says she filmed six days a week, up to 20 hours a day, sometimes getting called back four hours after wrapping. “My boyfriend at the time, Brad Pitt”—she smirks at the ultimate name-drop—“was over for my birthday.” Paltrow appealed for a 12-hour turnaround, which should have been standard. One of the producers granted it, but “he made me feel like I was the most entitled…” she trails off, still palpably disturbed. “It was such a horrible feeling.” She imagined him “crafting a story that I’m being difficult…and of course you didn’t say anything, because you could already tell that the guy with the power was like, ‘I don’t like what I’m seeing here.’ ”

It’s one small example, Paltrow says in the way that women do when they’re sharing a story that may or may not sound egregious to others but lingers under their skin with a vengeance.

She’s not quite sure how to feel now about Marty Supreme’s plum awards-season release, or the fact that the group chat could be celebrating her nomination in a year’s time. As much as she’s cheering for Moore today, she doesn’t know if she’s aiming for another Oscar herself. “I had the validation so early that it was almost not a good thing.” Paltrow seems to choose her words carefully—she knows it’s delicate to unpack the perils of what she calls Hollywood’s “highest man-made marker” of success. “It’s just not as glamorous as it looks.”

Her Oscar moment is a collective core memory: Paltrow, 26 and tearful in princess pink Ralph Lauren, accepting best actress over Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Brazilian screen legend Fernanda Montenegro (whose fans lurk in Paltrow’s Instagram comments to this day). In the aftermath Paltrow was still crying, and shaking, in her general practitioner’s office in New York, asking, “What’s wrong with me?” Paltrow’s doctor sent her to a therapist. Her beloved dad, Bruce, was battling throat cancer—he died from complications during a bout with pneumonia a few years later, while he was with Paltrow celebrating her 30th birthday in Rome. The Oscar offered almighty industry love, but it couldn’t truly validate the type A Paltrow.

“There’s a healthy level of ambition, like, ‘I know who I am’ and ‘I want the world,’ ” she reflects, pausing to gaze at a little lizard outside the window, darting around. “And then there’s another aspect that comes from damage…. ‘I want that so that a hole will be filled, so that other people will find me worthy, so that I’ll be lovable.’ ” Looking back, she says, “I think I was very much dancing between those things.”

By the late 1990s Paltrow had spawned a strain of disdain that would, years later, mutate into Hatha hate: the particular public annoyance at a woman accused of being cloyingly sincere, caught in the act of trying and, ugh, effectively succeeding. (Paltrow’s win came after a Miramax promotional push so ruthless, it became the blueprint for the modern Oscar campaign.) Factor in a daughter-of-privilege résumé—she attended the elite Crossroads in LA and the all-girls Spence on New York’s Upper East Side—and Paltrow became an avatar for every pretty, popular blond girl you’ve ever hated and wanted to be.

More than two decades later, she’s vowing to let go of “the idea that I can correct misperceptions,” as she reflected in a year-end Instagram post. She likens the backlash to the overhead projectors in classrooms of yore: people slapping their baggage onto the glass and projecting it upon her like a screen. “We have this illusion of control, especially if we’re type A women, and so it’s very hard to admit futility and defeat there,” Paltrow says of her persona. “I will never be able to change this, never.”

Was Paltrow’s “empire,” as it’s often called with ominous Star Wars vibes, “in trouble?” Was “the gilt finally wearing off Goop and its golden girl”? Was Goop “going down the drain?”

The stakes are even higher now that Paltrow is CEO and spokesmodel of Goop, a company fashioned in her image. Her name blesses the brand, but Paltrow believes that sensational celebrity media coverage carries over to the business. “It used to be, ‘We can take shots at these models or movie stars ’cause it’s fun to read,’ ” Paltrow says, including fellow famous founders Hailey Bieber, Blake Lively, and her friend Reese Witherspoon, but it’s more precarious when they’re answering to investors. “You’re crossing a line because you could be impacting my P&L”—corporate-speak for profit and loss. “If it’s not true and you’re creating a negative perception about any one of our businesses, what’s your responsibility there? It’s different than just saying, ‘Look at this gross picture of Gwyneth on a beach on vacation.’ ”

Because those narratives can filter into boardrooms? I ask.

“It can,” Paltrow nods, “and it can impact sales.”

Last fall Goop did its most controversial cleanse yet. In September the pioneering celeb-influencer company laid off 18 percent of its staff, or 40 employees, as it strove to reorient its wide-ranging wellness business around the pillars of fashion, beauty, and food. Two months later Goop cut 10 more staffers, including the beauty director.

The headlines had questions—so many questions. Was Paltrow’s “empire,” as it’s often called with ominous Star Wars vibes, “in trouble?” Was “the gilt finally wearing off Goop and its golden girl” Paltrow? Was Goop “going down the drain,” “nearing its end,” “about to fall”?

Paltrow tells me she did not read such stories. “I. Don’t. Care.” Each word staccato, slipping into CEO mode, her kitchen table suddenly giving boardroom. Paltrow’s no longer correcting misperceptions, but in a roundabout way she goes on to. “Maybe I would care if it was true that we’re doing it because business wasn’t good, but I’m very clear…. We are not doing this because the business is faltering. We’re doing this because I need to optimize EBITDA”—again, finance lingo for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a trending measure of profitability. The acronym, pronounced like a word, rolls off Paltrow’s tongue, along with a glossary of other biz-side jargon. Unfamiliar with intimacy coordinators, this is her industry language now. “My business is a good business and it’s a strong business and the brand is strong,” Paltrow doubles down. “Case in point, we’re still here. We just had our best year.” A representative for Goop later echoed CEO Paltrow, saying in an email that “2024 was Goop’s best year yet from an overall revenue perspective”—up 10 percent over 2023—and reporting “significant growth” in the company’s chosen channels, with Goop Beauty’s revenue increasing 34 percent, upmarket fashion line G. Label’s 42 percent, and Goop Kitchen, the brightly healthy takeout business fanning out across LA, delivering 60 percent growth year over year. On the topic of EBITDA, Goop does not reveal whether or not it is profitable.

According to Paltrow, Goop’s was a common corporate woe. “We’ve gotten bloated,” she says. “We need to focus.” Since its inception in 2008 as an e-newsletter containing Paltrow’s deep thoughts and coveted recommendations—a luxe DailyCandy sent from her kitchen table in London—Goop had ballooned to include, among other interests, supplements, a furniture line, brick-and-mortar stores, a podcast, a magazine, two Netflix series, and a Goop at Sea cruise to Cozumel. Especially during COVID, Paltrow says, Goop fought to keep existing customers by hatching new products—too many of them, she suggests. “Companies do this all the time,” she says of streamlining, but she believes Goop’s case was sensationalized by the press. “If you’re writing this and it’s behind a paywall, are you going to buy into: ‘It’s standard’?”

That’s not to say Paltrow takes the layoffs lightly. “Unfortunately, we had to do a reorg,” she says, her tone still careful. We migrate to her soothing living room awash in neutrals, famed in design-porn circles for its onyx bar and leather hammock hanging from chains mounted in the ceiling. Paltrow slides off her shearling clogs and sits in a stag split on her sectional, like a modern dancer. I remember that her reflective year-end Instagram mentioned letting go of “some very cherished colleagues.”

“These are my people that I love, and the emotional pain that I went through is different than a lot of CEOs,” she says, her voice tightening. “A lot of people that I know are like, ‘Let’s just flip the switch. Who gives a shit?’ But that’s not me.” Accepting what kind of CEO she is—one who’s active on Slack and EBITDA-conversant but prefers not to dive into Excel—is an ongoing process.

She says she’s ready for fun again, to open more stores and refresh the brand, including Goop Beauty, the “clean” line that includes a $274 bundle of Paltrow’s preferred peptide serum, gentle exfoliator, and water cream; and G. Label, the Italian-made fashion line that approximates shopping Gwyneth’s ski-trial courtcore (she models a $595 puff-sleeve polo sweater on the website).

“Forgive me if this gets too nerdy, but basically, the sexual-wellness customers were not the best customers,” she says. Vaginas were not scalable: The shoppers who gag-gifted a candle or vibrator failed to return to Goop for cashmere or peptide serum.

Today, Paltrow says her editorial team is working on a piece parsing data on air quality in the aftermath of the fires. “We’re not a news organization, but when it comes to wellness, I think people do want to understand what our take is,” she says.

What the company notably does not highlight in its vision for the future is the sort of vaginal phenomena that, for better or worse, put the company on the map: yoni eggs to squeeze during Kegels, a viral “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle, or the recommendation of a $15,000 gold-plated dildo. Much to Paltrow’s chagrin, the brand remains unshakably linked to this New Age sex goddess–hood. “So stupid,” Paltrow groans a little. “It was like 15 years ago.” (The candle dropped in 2020, but fair enough for a 109-year-old.)

According to Paltrow, sex actually didn’t sell—not the way Goop needed it to. “Forgive me if this gets too nerdy, but basically, the sexual-wellness customers were not the best customers from an LTV perspective,” she says, meaning lifetime value, a form of brand loyalty. Vaginas were not scalable: The shoppers who gag-gifted a candle or vibrator failed to return to Goop for cashmere or peptide serum. “Also, I think it was very clickbait-y and just a lot, which we didn’t mean to happen.” Paltrow insists that the candle was “a total fucking fluke” (the candle in question has floral notes and was meant to cheekily rebut the idea of shame). Goop’s sexually experimental side also proved legally controversial: In 2018, the company agreed to a $145,000 settlement (which did not indicate liability) with the California Food, Drug, and Medical Device Task Force after a consumer protection complaint alleged that three Goop products made unsubstantiated medical claims, including jade and quartz yoni eggs intended to “balance hormones, regulate menstrual cycles, prevent uterine prolapse, and increase bladder control,” according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

To be clear, Goop isn’t abandoning sexual wellness, which Paltrow still considers “super important.” It still sells its own Viva la Vulva clitoral vibrator, among many others, and a $66 jade yoni egg with instructions for insertion but no medical guarantees (both on final sale at press time), plus what Paltrow touts as “the best sex oil in the world,” a sleek black bottle promising, according to its product description, “just the right amount of slip.”

With Goop as her platform, Paltrow has cemented herself as our ultimate celebrity influencer and alternative-wellness thought leader, seeding the culture with phenomena including but certainly not limited to yoga (in her own estimation), amicable divorce (more on that shortly), cupping, unconventional baby names, newsletters, avocado toast, stealth wealth, longevity, and the celebrity lifestyle industrial complex itself.

She’s been thinking about this a lot—her place in the culture—here in her newly quiet house, through the emotional roller coaster of perimenopause. “I feel like more than being a successful actress or being a part of #MeToo, or being one of the first actresses to launch a lifestyle brand,” her eyes flutter a little as she leads up to it, “and I haven’t fully fleshed this out yet, so I’m sort of saying this to you as I’m thinking it for the first time, but it might just be that my role is to pave the way,” Paltrow says tentatively. “By some instinct or curiosity or desire, I go somewhere and I hack through the path and I get the scratches of hacking through, but I make space for other people, then, to do it.” She’s just putting it out there: What if the shit she’s pilloried for—but that is gradually, eventually, adopted more widely—“that’s the point of my life, maybe?”

It’s a perspective that might not endear her to her critics, but don’t you see the trend line of eccentrically named babies and remarkably civil co-parents? Could anyone feasibly deny that Goop walked so The Tig and Poosh and Witherspoon’s and Lively’s conglomerates could run? At one point, in the kitchen, Paltrow cheerfully noted that we were wearing matching white wide-leg jeans. Now I wonder if I’m only wearing them, somehow, because of her.

In 2015 a Canadian professor of health law and science policy published a book entitled Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? “I don’t think it was a bestseller,” she quips. Now Paltrow says one of her friends is jokingly proposing a sequel: “Was Gwyneth Paltrow Right About Everything?”

Her laughter rings through the quiet house.

With her influence, what should Paltrow impress upon the culture next? Surprising no one, the California-born wellness obsessive is “very fascinated” by Make America Healthy Again, the sweeping movement championed by new Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. MAHA advocates for some commonsense concerns like curbing ultraprocessed foods and banning red dye in food and drugs, but its leader has promulgated pseudoscience, most damningly through vaccine conspiracy theories that, in contrast to the stated purpose of the movement, could threaten the public health.

“A lot of our institutions are really failing us and that is this pervasive, sweeping axiom that Americans feel,” Paltrow observes. Even if they disagree on which institutions and how, she believes people feel unprotected. “Consumers shape markets and people are starting to vote with their wallets on this stuff,” she adds, temporarily slipping back into CEO mode.

Politically, Paltrow has described herself as an “independent thinker.” She hosted starry fundraisers at her LA home for Pete Buttigieg in 2019 and the Democratic National Committee, with guest of honor President Barack Obama, in 2014. In LA’s 2022 mayoral race, Paltrow endorsed Rick Caruso, the billionaire retail magnate behind The Grove, who’d changed his affiliation from Republican to Democrat. She shared a requisite voting-sticker selfie on Instagram during the 2024 elections but did not specify for whom she checked the ballot.

When I bring up Kennedy as the de facto face of MAHA’s big tent, it stays murky. Take raw, unpasteurized milk. Last March, Paltrow told The Skinny Confidential podcast that she drinks raw cream in her coffee every morning, specifically from the Fresno, California–based Raw Farm, whose founder and CEO counts Kennedy as a longtime customer. “There is a line of thinking that says, ‘It’s not necessarily that cow dairy is so hard for us. It’s the way that we raise the cows,’ ” Paltrow tells me. The same school of thought posits that “we have for millennia been drinking milk that’s unprocessed and doesn’t have antibiotics.” She cites raw milk as an example of a topic “where people say, ‘Oh, this is pseudoscience’ ” and point to a lack of evidence. But “is someone going to invest in getting a data set around raw milk?” Paltrow asks. “It’s not going to be the dairy industry, right?” (In December, Raw Farm recalled all of its raw whole milk and cream after health officials detected instances of bird flu in some products. Raw Farm said, “There are no illnesses associated with H5N1 in our products” and blamed the recall on politics. It resumed bottling in early January.)

Paltrow also mentions the herbicide glyphosate, which Kennedy has linked to “many diseases,” including some of the liver and kidneys. (The International Agency for Research on Cancer [a unit of the World Health Organization, from which the US is planning to withdraw] said in 2015 that glyphosate “probably” causes cancer, but the EPA, using a different methodology, has said it carries low toxicity for people.) “We spray glyphosate on everything and it’s a carcinogen, and we have all these lobbyists to keep everything in place,” Paltrow asserts. Even junk food, in her observation, has gotten junkier. On a plane in Europe recently, she ate peanut M&M’s: “I would not do that in America.” As Paltrow told Moses the other day when he was home over winter break, she loves Oreos! But when she ate one recently, she thought: This doesn’t even taste like the Oreo of my youth. (Nabisco’s parent company did not respond to an email asking if it has changed the cookie formula.)

Paltrow seems to avoid naming Kennedy himself, saying she doesn’t subscribe to any one leader in her personal concerns about the US health system, instead seeking to educate herself.

“Look, we’re all incredibly flawed. I think the leaders’ piece is what makes people think, I’m going to take this research into my own hands and I’m going to try to make the best choices that I can for me and my family,” she says. In this time of tumult—Paltrow cites tsunamis and wars and school shootings, neo-Nazis and fires—she says she understands why leaders with rallying cries are ascendant.

“A lot of those leaders are, well, they’re all humans, so they’re all imperfect and sometimes they’re way past imperfect and it’s actually really dissonant with how other people hold information or how they feel politicians are supposed to behave,” Paltrow says, working herself up a bit. “I’ve felt like I’m gripping the sides of my chair. What is the way through all of this and what is actually meant to be incendiary and what is actually meant to be policy?”

It’s either validating or a little scary that Paltrow, open-eye-meditating queen of wellness, is feeling as unwell as the rest of us. “I am riddled with anxiety,” she says of the political and topographical landscape. (A few days before our interview, President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term.) “My nervous system is so fucked.” When her phone pings, notifying her that someone’s at the door, she clocks the fire-watch app. She’d evacuated from LA and is still straining to comprehend the devastation 90 miles southeast. She and Goop announced more than $2 million in donations of products to charitable organizations, including Baby2Baby and Altadena Girls.

Just then, Paltrow’s eyes dart out her living room window. “Why is there a drone over my house?” she wonders in a whisper at a speck hovering in the sky. By now, she’s developed a spidey sense for lurking paparazzi. Falchuk will assure her otherwise, but 95 percent of the time, she says, the photos materialize.

When I feebly suggest that maybe the drone came for Oprah or Harry and Meghan, Paltrow cracks: “It’s three for the price of one up here.”

Montecito is a Spanish-style Eden outside LA that’s become as fabled as its residents, which have included American royal Oprah Winfrey, the Sussexes, Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, Rob Lowe, and Ariana Grande. I tell Paltrow that people picture them all dining alfresco at a long, biblical table—“like a Nancy Meyers movie!” she chimes in.

“I don’t know Meghan and Harry,” Paltrow says. I’m surprised, given how close they live. “I mean, I’ve met Meghan, who seems really lovely, but I don’t know her at all,” she clarifies. “Maybe I’ll try to get through their security detail and bring them a pie.” She hasn’t seen the trailer for Markle’s Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, either. Based on its fresh-veggie-filled emphasis on the good life, the show seems quite Goop-adjacent, but Paltrow is unthreatened. If anything, she’s inclined to defend the duchess: When “there’s noise about certain women in the culture, I do have, always, a strong instinct to stand up for them.”

She says she welcomes Markle—and any number of Goop’s descendants—to the proverbial lifestyle space. “I was raised to see other women as friends, not foes,” Paltrow says firmly. “I think there’s always more than enough to go around. Everybody deserves an attempt at everything that they want to try.” It’s a lesson Paltrow learned early, around age 19, from Danner. She’d lost out on a much-coveted role and was griping about the actor cast instead. She says her mother cut her off, telling young Paltrow: “Another woman is never your competition” and “what is right for you will find you.”

Paltrow hasn’t always received that grace, especially from perhaps her most fitting foremother, Martha Stewart. “She’s a movie star,” Stewart sniped of Paltrow in 2014. “If she were confident in her acting, she wouldn’t be trying to be Martha Stewart.” When I recall the “dig-ish,” Paltrow aptly corrects me, saying there was nothing “ish” about it. Paltrow handled it with aplomb back then, quipping that she was honored that Stewart considered Goop competition. “And then you have someone like Oprah that’s like, ‘Of course I’ll be your first podcast guest,’ ” Paltrow shrugs. “That’s how I try to be with other women.”

Paltrow has dreamed of having a house in Montecito since she was a freshman at the nearby University of California, Santa Barbara, from which she dropped out to pursue acting. Later, while living in London, Paltrow and her young family came to visit close friends Lowe and his wife, Sheryl. (A teenage Paltrow first met Sheryl as Danner’s makeup artist on a TV movie in Florida. “She was dating Keanu at the time, who was my celebrity crush,” Paltrow gushes.)

As a host here, Paltrow is boundaried. A friend gifted her with a cheeky pillow embroidered with her well-known dinner party policy: “Please Leave By 9.” After a 6:00 or 6:30 p.m. start, she says guests will be “enthralled” in conversation before realizing, “Oh my God, hurry, it’s 8:49! We’ve got to get to the end of this.” I broach a piece of gossip that somehow became very public, when a socialite houseguest supposedly soiled a room in one of her properties, possibly the one in which we sit. “I understand,” a pained Paltrow says, “and I also, like, am just not going to…” she trails off with an existential cringe, saying nothing more but, I note, not leaping to denying it.

For the master of rebranding difficult life transitions, “empty nest” simply could not stand. Following the lead of “psychological astrologer” Jennifer Freed, PhD, Paltrow is striving to reframe herself and Falchuk as “free birds.”

“Empty nest is so demoralizing,” she says, “but if you say we’re free birds and you embody that, then you have this much more energized, optimistic” outlook.

First, in fall 2022, Paltrow dropped Apple off at Vanderbilt, lauded as an “Ivy of the South.” “It was like a carrot for her,” Paltrow says of her firstborn, whom she calls dryly funny and “so smart.” Her doppelgänger daughter joined Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and chose the interdisciplinary major of law, history, and society. Then, last fall, Moses enrolled at Brown, renowned for allowing students the freedom to design their own courses of study. “He heard how onerous requirements can be,” Paltrow says. Like Martin, her son “is incredible at math and he’s also an amazing musician.” Moses sings with his father on Coldplay’s “Humankind,” is credited as a cowriter on “All My Love,” and “he’s already in this band…” Paltrow says tentatively. It’s called Dancer and has performed at the New York bar Mercury Lounge, among other gigs, with Moses on vocals and guitar, evoking glimmers of his dad.

I wonder if the Martins are treated normally at school, outside the bubble of LA and their shared alma mater, Crossroads. “College is a great equalizer,” Paltrow says, though she remembers dropping off Apple, standing in an elevator, realizing, “Oh, this is a thing. I feel the energy. I feel the stares.” Apple had a few uncomfortable experiences, but Paltrow doesn’t seem worried. “Look, they’re the children of two super-famous people, and so they understand what comes with that. They’ve grown up in it,” she explains. “You would be surprised at how lovely and unassuming and down-to-earth they are.” Following the British, as the family lived in England first, Paltrow raised them with the mantra of “manners maketh man.” (Perhaps contrary to expectation, she is not a practitioner of “gentle” or “child-led” parenting: “They’re not supposed to lead themselves because it challenges their survivability in nature,” she says.)

In a Goop TikTok, Paltrow laughs heartily at an off-screen narrator’s quip that she “loved being a nepo baby so much, she created two of her own” (this despite her distaste for the term). She has shared that Danner tried to steer her away from Hollywood, deeming her too smart for it. “I’m sure my mother was writing stuff on her transparency and projecting it onto me,” Paltrow recalls the earlier metaphor. As they both know, “it can be a very painful career.” Paltrow has no such designs on her children’s futures. She might have tried to dissuade them when they were younger. Now, “I feel like the world needs artists, especially in the face of AI,” she muses. “We need real art that comes from souls and hearts.”

Plus, Paltrow is settling into the knowledge that parenting, from birth on, is just a lengthy exercise in letting go. “There’s this deep inherent pain in letting go because we’ve paired it with protecting them, and we can’t always protect them,” she says. “We have to deeply let go and let them have their own experience and be the kind of person that they want to boomerang back to.”

The Paltrow-Martins reconvened in Paris in November for Le Bal des Débutantes, where Apple debuted in a Valentino confection with tiers of blue chiffon custom-made by Alessandro Michele himself. The high fashion (Paltrow wore sheer polka-dot Valentino) and glittery privilege (Apple was escorted by Austro-German count Leo Henckel von Donnersmarck) sparked retro-Gwyneth levels of fascination online. Apple “always had a lot of trepidation around being in the public eye,” Paltrow says, with the exception of attending her “dream” Chanel couture show in 2023. When Apple was invited to the ball and expressed an interest, Paltrow thought, Well, it’s a very unusual kind of thing to do, but said, “We’re going to embrace this and support you.” She remained dubious, asking Apple, “Is Dad going to wear a tie and do this waltz?” (Martin, indeed, wore the tie and did the waltz.) In the end, Paltrow submitted to Paris magic: “Sometimes we need some levity and we need frosting on the cake.” Joined by Danner and her brother, Jake, “it was honestly one of the most special weekends of my entire life.”

The subsequent photos of Paltrow and Martin happily coexisting with their children at the Shangri-La hotel provided the latest glimpse at their long exercise in conscious uncoupling, a concept introduced via Goop alongside the news of their separation in 2014. (It was first coined by therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas.) Back then, Paltrow’s website crashed, the culture wobbled on its axis, and as ever, intense eye-rolling abounded. Declaring their desire for a humane divorce shouldn’t have been that controversial, but Paltrow says she understands how people might have interpreted her and Martin’s lofty plan as an indictment of their own divorces, or their parents’.

Paltrow struggled to adhere to the mission herself in the early days. She remembers one standing Sunday brunch in LA with Martin and the kids: “We were in a really bad spot. I was like, ‘Fuck this. I cannot do this.’ ” To his credit, Paltrow says, Martin “looked me in the eyes and he was like, ‘I love you. We can do this.’ ” She softened, and they all proceeded to brunch.

Of her relationship with Martin now, “It’s not quite brother, but we are complete family,” Paltrow says. “He is there for me through anything, and vice versa.”

How has conscious uncoupling expanded to include Falchuk; his ex-wife, Suzanne Bukinik, from whom he split in 2013; plus Martin’s longtime girlfriend Dakota Johnson? “It’s actually quite beautiful,” Paltrow says of their blended family unit. “It continues to evolve.” For example, Bukinik recently stayed with Paltrow, Falchuk, and Isabella in Montecito when she was evacuated during the fires. “It feels much better when everybody can be together and people can let go of the more difficult, painful parts of what led to a divorce and focus on the things that led to the marriage in the first place,” Paltrow says. “Once you fully let go of ‘We used to sleep in the same bed’ vibes, a world of possibility opens up.” It’s not without complication, but “I love Chris,” Paltrow says. “I love Suzanne.” Though she’s held hands with Johnson on Instagram and called her a “good friend” in the past, Paltrow does not mention her in the equation.

Decades after their 1997 breakup, Paltrow remains friendly with ex-fiancé Pitt. (And ex-boyfriend Ben Affleck too.) Pitt may forever be mentioned alongside her, with their matching blond side parts (a coincidence, she’s said) and granny glasses immortalized in ’90s nostalgia. “He’s a very intriguing character,” Paltrow acknowledges, seemingly unbothered by the association. “It’s like having dated, I don’t know, Prince William or something. That’s always going to come up.” Still, the star of Sliding Doors doesn’t ponder alternate realities. “I really embrace the roads that I take,” she says. “I almost never go back and noodle about choices.”

The moving trucks arrive from LA, and the scene is elegantly Goopy, as far as moves go. A Tetris board of cleanly taped boxes amasses in Paltrow’s driveway. The crew unloads at least one Pilates reformer. Someone asks Paltrow’s head of security where she wants the wine. Paltrow speaks to staffers in fluent Spanish, then nuzzles Falchuk, who’s appeared by the side door in a shawl-collar sweater and shearling clogs. This is Falchuk’s favorite Gwyneth. “She’s the best when she’s home and relaxed and totally unguarded. Cooking in her pajamas (or topless when the burners get too hot), goofy and sexy and sophisticated all at once,” he tells me. “The joy she takes in looking after everyone and in her morning coffee. The occasional ‘oh fuck off’ I hear from my office when she drops something or reads an email she doesn’t like. I think the one narrative that is right about her is that she really loves her life and she works hard to give everyone else the opportunity to feel that way about their own.”

Two days ago, Paltrow was taking Moses to LAX. After five weeks at home, he seemed conflicted about going back to college. “It’s so interesting that we are hardwired to be uncomfortable with change,” Paltrow says. “Change is the only axiom on the planet, every single day.”

HAIR, CHRIS McMILLAN; MAKEUP, JENNA KUCHERA; MANICURE AND PEDICURE, ASHLIE JOHNSON; TAILOR, HASMIK KOURINIAN; SET DESIGN, MARY HOWARD. LOCATION, BELLOSGUARDO FOUNDATION; PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY CAMP PRODUCTIONS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.