Gwyneth Paltrow is a beloved actress and wellness entrepreneur — but that doesn’t mean she feels understood.
“No one will understand me until I’m dead,” Paltrow, 52, said in a Thursday, August 28, teaser clip of her appearance on “The Cutting Room Floor” podcast.
Paltrow, who shot to stardom in the 90s, is well aware of the “narrative” surrounding her persona, though she admits she doesn’t necessarily understand where it comes from or even why it exists.
“I have never created my own narrative. I’m aware that that exists,” she explained. “But I have had a really strange life in this respect. Like, imagine being an actual person and know that people are characterizing you in a way and you can’t understand how they arrived at that narrative. I have no idea who people are talking about. I’ve lived for many decades now with this avatar that’s, like, projected on very very strongly, and I don’t know why.”
She continued, “I know why, but these are like very tropey, reductive things that you could say about a lot of people and culture. And I also feel like I get distilled down to the most easy-to-understand trope. We’re all human beings, so it hurts when somebody willfully misrepresents you or misperceives you. You want to say, ‘But this is not true,’ or, ‘I never said that,’ but lately I’ve been really trying to almost meditate on this idea of, if you could get to the stage where you could really let go of trying to correct misperception, what could that do?”
Paltrow says that social media — Instagram in particular — has also changed the way that people see and therefore understand celebrities.
“So, in the 90s there was all this mystery around movie stars and that was sort of part of the machine, I think, in a lot of ways,” she explained. “In the olden days movie stars were supposed to be mysterious and you were given these tidbits about their lives and it was so exciting and titillating. And then that bred this whole tabloid thing that reached an apex before Instagram.”
She added, “Instagram kind of dismantled a lot of that business model. There was this pursuit of images and information to sort of humanize celebrities, and then we segued into this bizarre new media milieu where everybody was putting their life in front. But for me, because I’m introverted, it’s been uncomfortable.”
Paltrow said that she wasn’t “trained” to interact with fans via social media the way other celebrities may have been, so putting her life on Instagram feels “counterintuitive.”
“It’s not intuitive. It’s very uncomfortable,” she continued. “But I understand from a marketing perspective how valuable that lever is and how, if you’re growing a CPG business, it’s very hard not to be a celebrity who is trying to leverage their celebrity without those channels.”
While Paltrow doesn’t seem interested in clearing up any misconceptions about who she is as a person, she was willing to debunk some misunderstandings about her successful — and sometimes controversial — wellness company, Goop.
“I don’t think that everything on the site is unattainable, but trying to be everything to everybody is a disaster,” Paltrow explained, while admitting that her company’s price point is out of reach for many. “The Goop woman is kind of, like, the ‘me’ of her circle.”
Paltrow then went on to describe the average Goop customer.
“She’s 40 plus, she has 2.2 children, college educated, largely coastal,” she said, before adding that, “yes,” she is also rich.
“Yes, we kind of have two cohorts — we have a reader cohort and a shopper cohort, but the shopper cohort has a higher household income than the reader,” she explained.
Paltrow says she is not selling women the idea that they can become her, but rather “selling people the prospect that they can be them.”
“There’s also something irreverent about me,” she added. “There’s a push back against existing systems that I think our woman likes. That’s who I believe Goop is speaking to.”
Paltrow also denies that her company went out of its way to be “gimmicky.”
“We didn’t try to be gimmicky,” she said. “We weren’t like, ‘Hey, let’s make a vibrator to shock the world.’ The stuff that we talked about that people flipped out about that now is, like, so mainstream. There are so many examples of that … pelvic floor health, gut health, plant medicine, conscious uncoupling, clean food.”
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