Gwyneth Paltrow is speaking out about her infamous split from Brad Pitt.
The 53-year-old Iron Man star met the 62-year-old Fight Club actor when she was cast in Se7en in 1994, before getting engaged two years later—but by 1997 they had ended things.
“I met him on set and like we had like kind of a love at first sight thing,” she said on the podcast Friends Keep Secrets, with Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco. “It was pretty awesome. It was really fun.”
Calling the experience “overwhelming,” she added, “I was just young, and we were working all over different parts of the world.”
When co-host Lil Dicky asked whether the relationship had felt more “like a fantasy than a reality,” Paltrow replied, “There was an aspect of it that was very heady. I was very young, and he was this beautiful movie star.”
She admitted that when things fell apart she was “so bummed,” adding, “I think the press aspect and all that makes it feel larger than life in a way.”
“You have to carry this faux cultural importance piece, this extra burden and this extra shame that it didn’t work out,” she admitted.
It’s not the first time Paltrow has spoken about her pain in the aftermath of their split, telling the Call Me Daddy podcast in 2023 that she had been “totally heartbroken when we broke up.”
“It was the right thing at that time, but it was really hard. There were a number of things that had happened,” she said at the time. “He was nine years older than me—he knew what he wanted, he was ready to do it, and I was kind of all over the place.”
“So it was really one of those difficult things, where I felt like, ‘Oh my God, not only am I not ready, I’m not living up to the standards again.’ It was a familiar refrain I felt about myself,” Paltrow added.
She later married Chris Martin of Coldplay fame in 2003, but they split 11 years later in 2014. Four years later, she married Brad Falchuk in 2018.
