Gwyneth Paltrow Talks Intimacy Coordinators & Making Out With Timothée Chalamet
Gwyneth Paltrow shares her journey back to acting in 'Marty Supreme' and her insights on intimacy coordinators.
Gwyneth Paltrow may have begun shunning Hollywood two decades ago, but it never really got over her. “I get approached, still, surprisingly a lot, and I say no,” Paltrow told Vanity Fair. But with the urging of her brother, filmmaker Jake Paltrow, she agreed to take on a role in Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme”– which also happens to be his first film since 2019’s “Uncut Gems.” Taking on the vulnerabilities of a new character wasn’t easy, in part because of how things have changed since her last major film. “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” the Oscar-winning actress claimed.
After cameras captured Paltrow and Timothée Chalamet engaged in a hot and heavy Central Park makeout session last summer, Paltrow was more than happy to share more “Marty Supreme” details. “I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” she remarked. “There’s a lot—a lot.” What there wasn’t was an intimacy coordinator. Not because there wasn’t one hired — there was — but because Paltrow didn’t find it necessary.
“I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on,'” Paltrow joked. “We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back,'” she remembered. “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‘” — demonstrating putting a hand on her own shoulder — “I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
While Paltrow admittedly knew little about Chalamet before meeting him, and hadn’t seen any of his films, he impressed her. “He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid,” Paltrow corrects herself. “He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.”
Not much is known about Safdie’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed film “Uncut Gems. Many have assumed a film about a table tennis pro named Marty was a nod to real-life Ping-Pong hustler Marty Reisman, while producer A24 has said that “it’s not actually based on him.”
Paltrow’s character, which she refers to as a table tennis WAG, is an unexpected choice for her first serious film in 15 years. “This woman who is married to someone who is in the Ping-Pong mafia, as it were” before beginning an affair 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,” she said.