Gwyneth Paltrow truly defined Generation X in Hollywood with her sweet blend of indie and mainstream projects to make a name for herself. Her truly iconic ‘90s role in Se7en showed off her ability to bring warmth and vulnerability in her limited screen time. A few years later would follow Paltrow’s Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love with her best ‘00s movie The Royal Tenenbaums proving she can steal the show. But the Goop CEO admits she has the ability to know when things aren’t going well on a movie set.
Not every star works on a movie with total confidence that they picked the best project. Gwyneth Paltrow sure has been there when she got real with Elle about feeling stuck in a project she didn’t have faith in:
My worst job was probably a movie I did that I won’t name. I was miserable doing it, and it was a terrible movie. Here’s the thing about making movies: Sometimes, on the first week, you’re like, ‘Oh shit, this is going to be a bad movie.’ And there’s kind of nothing you can do about it.
It’s an understandable feeling to be "stuck" in a project you're not happy with but having no choice but to go through with what you started. The Proof actress may not have mentioned the movie she was talking about, but she’s spoken before about one movie she hated doing. Back in 2020, Gwyneth Paltrow said her least favorite performance was in the 2001 Farrelly Brothers movie Shallow Hal. In the comedy, she played Rosemary, who is really an obese woman but becomes the object of affection to Jack Black’s Hal after being hypnotized to believe she looks like a supermodel.
The Iron Man actress recalled the Shallow Hal experience as a “disaster.” She hated to wear the fat suit in the Tribeca Grand Hotel and getting “dismissive” looks from people. While the movie received negative reviews, it hit the #2 spot at the box office behind Monsters, Inc. and grossed $141 million on a budget of $40 million. Gwyneth Paltrow even received a Choice Movie: Comedy Actress nomination at the 2002 Teen Choice Awards. So, the American actress certainly didn’t sign on for a flop.
Gwyneth Paltrow continued to explain her intuition of coming onto a "bad" movie set and having no choice but to stay where you are:
You’re there, and you know it’s going to be bad, and so you’re just stuck there for three months making a bad movie. It’s happened to me a couple times. It’s not a good feeling
With Gwyneth Paltrow saying that she’s worked on “bad” movies “a couple times,” maybe Shallow Hal isn’t the only movie of hers she wished she hadn’t taken on. It’s true that even if you have a keen intuition on set that you signed on for something that wouldn’t be good, you have to roll with the punches. On the other hand, Paltrow has signed on for projects that unexpectedly became box office flops like View From the Top, Running With Scissors, and Mortdecai. So, it proves how unpredictable the film business can be.
The actress/businesswoman wouldn’t be the only star to have their instincts tell them they signed onto a “bad” project. Channing Tatum’s blunt opinion of G.I Joe: The Rise of the Cobra was recognizing the script “wasn’t any good,” but had to take on the action flick because of his three-picture deal with Paramount Pictures. Miles Teller also admitted he hated working on the Divergent movies, but he took it on for business reasons since YA dystopian adaptations were proven to be a success post-Hunger Games. So even if an actor has no faith in the project they signed up for, sometimes they’re encouraged to follow through with it for the sake of business.
While Gwyneth Paltrow admitted that she’s worked on movies she had a feeling wouldn’t be good, at least she has plenty of memorable movies on her belt that would make the poorly-received ones seem like an afterthought. Fortunately, her return to acting will be alongside Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. With the 2025 movie release being an A24 movie directed by Uncut Gems’ co-director Josh Safdie, I’d like to believe Paltrow made the right choice in her comeback project, coming to theaters on Christmas Day.
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