“A lot of Goop,” one of the attendees remarked on leaving Gwyneth Paltrow’s In Conversation talk taking place at the Red Sea Film Festival. “A bit lopsided,” another agreed. Many of the gathered gripped Marvel posters and wore Marvel T-shirts, but everyone was happy to welcome an actor whose career has spanned films as diverse as “Se7en,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Shakespeare in Love,” and the biggest applause came when she said that this was her first time in Saudi Arabia.
The first female CEO of the Saudi Research and Media Group Jomana al-Rashid acted as moderator and began the talk with a survey of Paltrow’s acting career and her first inspiration: “My mother is an actress. She did mostly theater. And so I grew up as a little girl watching her rehearse plays and running around the theater. My mother would even say she always felt a bit insecure. When she was on stage, she was the most powerful, integrated force of nature that I have ever seen. And so I wanted to be that.”
Having been spotted on the street by a casting agent as a 17-year-old schoolgirl — “I hate to say smoking cigarettes” — Paltrow snuck to the audition and, though she didn’t get the part, her mother found out and from that time on encouraged her. She identified her defining role as the secret smoker and one-time childhood prodigy Margot in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums”: “My daughter’s friends watch it and love it. It’s all these years later. It’s very fun.”
Asked about navigating the film industry as a woman, Paltrow responded that “women artists have always been allowed a bit more latitude than in other professions,” citing Sarah Bernhardt, Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor, “but at the same time there has been a side of Hollywood that has been a bit darker and more exploitative of young women. Luckily, I managed to avoid most of that.” This despite her harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, as detailed in Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s “She Said,” a book for which Paltrow was key as a source and supporter of other women giving their evidence.
As mentors, Paltrow listed David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as Wes Anderson and Anthony Minghella. But Paltrow recounted one early lesson that came from one of her lesser movies. “I did a really, really terrible movie with Jessica Lange (1998’s ‘Hush’). That is just shit. But I learned so much from watching her. She had such an interesting style and technique that she had developed over all these years. And so some people like that… I think about these amazing people that I got to work with and see all the different ways and then kind of made my own techniques.”
Much of the rest of the talk was taken up with Paltrow’s move into the Wellness industry with her pioneering Goop brand, and her role as a businesswoman and entrepreneur: “We’ve just started this very cool food delivery service. I’d love to bring it into the Middle East.” When the floor was opened to the audience, with the exception of a man from L.A., all the questions related to Paltrow’s film work. Would she return to acting? “I never say never.” One of the questioners grew up when cinema was banned in Saudi Arabia and recalled having to travel to another country in order to see “Emma.”
As for Marvel for which she played the role of Pepper Potts in films like “Iron Man” and “Avengers Assemble,” Paltrow recalled her reluctant entry into the MCU with Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man.” “They said it’s going to feel like doing an indie film. We’re gonna have fun and you don’t have to be in too much of the action part anyway. So I thought, Oh, okay. And we had such a good time. We improvised almost every scene of that movie. We would write it in the morning in Jon’s trailer, and it was like doing [an indie] film. Then, the movie was such a huge hit that we didn’t make them like that anymore. To be honest, I stopped watching them at some point. I’ve never seen ‘Endgame.’ I’ve never seen any of these. I can’t keep track. I probably should at some point.”
