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All of this started with Gwyneth Paltrow hear-
ing from Brad Falchuk—the producer, writer,
and director who is also, as of last fall, her hus-
band—that she’d influenced a character in a
Netflix series he was working on. “Then it
went to, ‘I’ve written this part for you. Would
you consider doing it?’” she says. Many ac-
tresses would have leaped at the chance. The
show, The Politician, was created by Ryan Mur-
phy, with whom Falchuk often collaborates
(they cocreated Glee and American Horror
Story), and is a dark comedy about class, priv-
ilege, and flawed, self-interested people who
nonetheless try their best to do good. More
specifically, it focuses on a young man, Pay-
ton (Ben Platt), driven by a strain of ambition
so potent it could fuel a rocket ship; the first
season follows his campaign to become high
school president, which is part one of his plan
to inhabit the White House. Paltrow was being
asked to play his mother. “I said, ‘No,’” she says.
“‘You know there’s no way I can do it.’”
In 1999, Paltrow won an Academy Award
for her role in Shakespeare in Love, and soon
became one of the biggest movie stars in the
world. But she began to pull back from Holly-
wood in 2004 after the birth of her first child
(she now has two—a daughter, Apple, and
son, Moses—with Coldplay singer Chris Mar-
tin, from whom she famously “consciously
uncoupled” in 2014). In recent years, she has
focused most of her attention on her online
wellness company, Goop, which began in
2008 as a newsletter she sent from her kitch-
en and is now a vast enterprise. The company
has faced controversy—a piece suggesting
women could benefit from placing a jade egg
in their vagina, for example, prompted disap-
proving statements from gynecologists (Goop
now tags certain posts “Fascinating and In-
explicable”)—but it’s been a huge financial
success. As of 2018, it was worth $250 million,
and Paltrow suggests it’s since expanded be-
yond that. “That’s an old number,” she says. Is
it higher or lower? “Of course it’s higher,” she
says. “Thank goodness. Oh my God.”
Since 2015, other than a brief cameo on
a TV show, Paltrow has only appeared on-
screen as Pepper Potts, the romantic foil to
Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man in Marvel’s
ever-expanding universe. Her difficulty keep-
ing track of which Marvel movies she’s in has
been a much-repeated joke on the internet,
though Paltrow doesn’t seem to be aware of
this. “I never read stuff,” she says. “But it is
confusing because there are so many Marvel
movies, and to be honest, I haven’t seen very
many of them. It’s really stupid and I’m sorry,
but I’m a 47-year-old mother.”
Regarding The Politician, though, Falchuk
and Murphy were persistent—“Like a dog
with a bone,” Paltrow says. The production
agreed to work around her schedule, and it
helped that Falchuk cut some of her lines.
“She’d show me a giant chunk of her dialogue
and be like, ‘I have a board meeting in two
days. Please don’t make me do this,’” he says.
(Platt describes the rapport between Pal-
trow and Falchuk, who met on the set of Glee
back in 2010, as being like “Cinderella and
Prince Charming.” Paltrow does say Falchuk
bossed her around; when I mention this to
him, he says, “Well, that’s my job. And I think
she liked it.”) “She was like, ‘Of course, I got
roped into it,’” says Paltrow’s friend Cameron
Diaz, leaning hard into the r. “It’s very funny.THE GOOP FOUNDER,
FORMERLY KNOWN AS
THE MOVIE STAR
GWYNETH PALTROW,
SHOWS US WHAT
WE’VE BEEN MISSING
IN HER NEW NETFLIX
SHOW. BY MOLLY
LANGMUIR. STYLED
BY CHARLES VARENNE.GWYNETH PALTROW
But she can do 4 million things at once.” (On
set, Paltrow often met with Goop staffers in
her downtime.)
Paltrow first appears about halfway
through the first episode, wearing an emerald-
green caftan and 10 million dollars’ worth of
jewelry, and dropping tidbits of advice that
could be straight out of a self-help book. In
another scene, after Payton has been hospi-
talized, she places crystals by his head and
brings in a healer. Her character can seem, in
other words, like a satirical take on the public
perception of Paltrow; that she’s viewed this
way amuses and frustrates people close to
her. “Anybody who thinks that someone as
successful as Gwyneth has just been floating
around in caftans all day is just being rude,”
says her friend Kate Hudson, who adds, “I’m
way more like that than Gwyneth—I really do
throw crystals around.”
But Falchuk insists that skewering these
projections wasn’t his intention. “The way
[my character is] as a mother is most closely
based on me,” Paltrow says. “He was also
borrowing from other aspects of my life.”
One plot point, for example, involves wealthy
parents paying for their children to get into
the Ivy League (oddly enough, it was writ-
ten before the college admissions scandal
emerged this past March). “I’m familiar with
that world,” she explains.
The Politician is concerned with ambi-
tion—what it means to be driven by it, how
it can distort you. Paltrow says that as an ac-
tress, she never felt that ambitious, though
this was as much for systemic reasons as it
was for personal ones. “In the ’90s, when I
was coming up, it was a very male-dominated
field,” she says. “You used to hear, ‘That ac-
tress is so ambitious,’ like it was a dirty word.”
(Paltrow was an early and essential source on
Harvey Weinstein for the New York Times.)
But now, with Goop, “my ambition has been
unleashed,” she admits.
That Paltrow is more concerned with busi-
ness these days than with acting would never
be apparent from her turn in The Politician,
though. “The reaction of most people in our
lives who have seen the show is, ‘Screw you
for not doing this more,’” Falchuk says. “Seeing
her quiet elegance and how she can command
a room was a reminder that she is a bona fide
screen presence,” Platt says. “She exudes light.”