Gwyneth Paltrow was always going to be a villain

I hated Gwyneth Paltrow before hating Gwyneth Paltrow went mainstream.

This is not a humblebrag. I’m not special, and I definitely wasn’t alone. Paltrow landed in mid-1990s media like a graceful explosive with an immaculate blast radius. It wasn’t just that she was a beautiful, pedigreed Hollywood newcomer, though she was: When Vanity Fair’s inaugural Hollywood Issue came out in 1995, Gwyneth was on the foldout cover alongside nine other leading ladies — and was, notably, the only one wearing an actual dress. Both influential and inescapable, almost immediately, she was an ideal hanger for Calvin Klein minimalist slip dresses. She cut her hair into an androgynous bob to match boyfriend Brad Pitt’s. She toted bottles of water around before that was a whole thing. After a “life-changing” experience at Manhattan’s J. Sisters salon, she became a one-woman PR campaign for the then-novel Brazilian bikini wax.

Paltrow seemed to arrive on the scene having everything and wanting for nothing. This was, it turns out, just what it was like to be Gwyneth Paltrow: Amy Odell’s new biography, “Gwyneth,” is full of anecdotes in which Paltrow walks into a room or a theater or a new school and, with the sheer force of her looks and charisma, makes everyone else recede into the background. It was more than beauty and more than nepotism; it was an astounding amount of confidence. Starting in childhood, she had the composure of someone who had never not belonged, because wherever she went, the world arranged itself around her. Her early run of independent movies — “Emma” (1995), “Sliding Doors” (1998), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) and “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) confirmed that Hollywood had, too.

The more movies Paltrow made and the more press she got, the more chances she had, offscreen, to become a figure of loathing. Shows of clueless privilege were common: Noting how different her background was from Pitt’s, she remarked about having to explain the difference between beluga and osetra caviar. In 2001, she promoted “Shallow Hal” — in which she played Rosemary, an obese woman whose “inner beauty” is only visible to Hal (Jack Black) — by talking about doing practice runs in her character’s fat suit. “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” She also insisted that the film wasn’t a series of fat jokes (it definitely was) but “a love letter to people who are overweight.” (It wasn’t, recalled Ivy Snitzer, the woman who played Paltrow’s body double.)

“Gwyneth” has the self-evident subtitle “The Biography,” but it would not have been surprising if the subtitle were, “Yes, She’s Really Like That.” The book splits Paltrow’s life into two distinct parts: as a movie star, and then as an entrepreneur/influencer whose unquestioning adherence to “wellness” opened a Pandora’s box of quackery and grifting. Both halves make a convincing case for why she’s been called the most hated celebrity in the world.

Like Odell’s previous biography about Vogue’s Anna Wintour, this one is unauthorized; unlike Wintour, Paltrow declined to help Odell by connecting her with sources, instead giving her a passive-aggressive runaround: Paltrow’s publicist, Odell writes, “told me they would be happy to help. But then I’d reach out to potential interviewees, saying I’d been in touch with Gwyneth’s office, and they would check with her about speaking with me and come back with a no or simply disappear altogether.”

Odell sourced decades worth of press and was ultimately able to interview more than 220 people from Paltrow’s past and present. Without outright saying “Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by Gwyneth Paltrow,” the picture Odell pieces together is of a woman ahead of her time, not only in style and influence, but in adopting the villain/victim persona that became a hallmark of the internet and reality-TV age. It’s a portrait of an artist who recognized that her fate was to be incredibly famous and thoroughly unrelatable, and decided she might as well go big.

Paltrow’s first big trip on the Hollywood hater-go-round was 1998, the year she won the Best Actress Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love” and gave a memorably messy, genuinely emotional acceptance speech. (Days after her win, Salon was among many outlets eviscerating her.) What viewers didn’t see, Odell notes, is the amount of effort by Miramax head Harvey Weinstein to make “Shakespeare” a winner, raise the profile of his still-independent studio, and solidify his belief that Paltrow belonged to him.

Her relationship with Weinstein was a different flavor of abusive than those he had with many other young actors, models, and employees. She was devastated the first time he suggested they “give each other massages” in his hotel room, and told a handful of people, including Pitt, who later confronted Weinstein about the incident. It was the first and last time Weinstein sexually harassed her, but their relationship was contentious from then on. The bullying Weinstein considered himself the architect of Paltrow’s career — she made seven films for Miramax between 1995 and 1998 — and his determination to protect her image ended up leading to a string of post-Oscar box-office bombs. Weinstein wasn’t the only reason Paltrow soured on Hollywood, but reading “Gwyneth,” it’s tempting to wonder what her film career might have become once she escaped his looming shadow.

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Instead, Paltrow’s villain arc really kicked off once she took a sustained break from acting, grieved her father’s death from cancer, got married and had children — and still couldn’t open her mouth without triggering an avalanche of mocking press, whether about her kids’ names, her clean-eating regimen, or leaving Terry Sanderson, the man who dared go up against her in the infamous “ski incident” trial of 2023, with a chilly “I wish you well,” after the court ruled in her favor. Putting her own voice out, on her own terms, with a website and newsletter about her own life, has been a way to reclaim the narrative.

“Gwyneth had been hated for one thing or another for the past eight years,” writes Odell, “and now she had a purpose — a mission that turned her most hateable qualities into a resource for others, giving her a forum to rewrite the story of her charmed life.” At a time when tabloid magazines insisted that stars were “just like us,” Goop.com had no pretense of being for the common woman. It was unabashedly about luxury, consumption and aspiration. If you didn’t understand its tagline — “Nourish the inner aspect” — then you weren’t the audience. If your body were more of a garage sale than a temple, it wasn’t for you. Goop’s genius was to make Paltrow, a woman who had never lived a normal life, seem relatable. Paltrow could introduce readers to Goop’s mission with a sentence like “My life is good because I am not passive about it,” giving readers a chance to indulge their inevitable eyerolls (Where the hell does this stick figure get off insinuating that the only difference between us is being proactive?) before second-guessing their own reaction (Wait. Am I passive about my life?)

(Rick Bowmer-Pool/Getty Images) Gwyneth Paltrow enters court before the reading of the verdict in her civil trial over a collision with another skier on March 30, 2023, in Park City, Utah.

Goop’s early years were Paltrow’s most quotable, and included such bangers as “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year” and “I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin.” The more she honed the persona of a truth-teller boldly challenging the paradigm of Western medicine, the more original and authoritative Goop appeared. But because both the site and Paltrow herself were reliable magnets for press mockery, distinguishing between the elevation of silly-but-harmless trends and the platforming of consequential misinformation wasn’t a high priority, and Goop’s promotion of scientifically unsupported health claims didn’t surface as a real danger until it was too late.

By the time a big enough contingent of medical professionals and public-policy experts were countering Goop’s recommendations of coffee enemas and vagina steaming, the now for-profit business was more concerned with bad PR than bad outcomes. Publicly speaking out against Goop’s platforming of vaccine deniers and snake-oil hucksters just furthered Paltrow’s self-invention as a wellness crusader, and her fan base grew. The wellness genie wasn’t — isn’t —going back in the bottle.

Paltrow’s legacy, Odell proposes, is not her films or her cookbooks or her vagina-scented candles, but her singular talent for “showing the world just how much consumers will spend and how much effort they would undertake for the luxury of being well, no matter what science tells us.” These days, Goop’s ostensibly maverick perspective is no longer on the margins, but part of a vast, atomized attention economy — not to mention at the center of a government that gives lip service to wellness while spurning reality and elevating cruelty. The aspirational world Paltrow worked so diligently to sell has come to look like something anyone can have. At least she has acting to fall back on.