Gwyneth Paltrow has opened up about the emotional impact of her breakup with Brad Pitt, saying the intense media attention made the split feel “larger than life”.
The Oscar-winning actor, 53, discussed her past relationship with Pitt, 62, during an appearance on Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco’s podcast Friends Keep Secrets on Tuesday.
Paltrow said she met Pitt after being cast in Se7en. She was around 22 at the time, while Pitt was 31.
“I met him on set and we had kind of a love-at-first-sight thing,” she recalled. “It was pretty awesome. It was really fun.”
However, she said the experience was also overwhelming as her own career began to grow and she was increasingly recognised as Pitt’s girlfriend.
“I was just young, and we were working all over different parts of the world,” Paltrow said.
The couple began dating in 1994, became engaged in 1996 and ended their relationship in June 1997.
Asked whether the romance felt more like a fantasy than reality, Paltrow acknowledged that it had been an intense experience.
“There was an aspect of it that was very heady,” she said. “I was very young and he was this beautiful movie star.”
Paltrow added that she and Pitt remain friends.
“He’s a great guy and I love him,” she said.
Recalling the breakup, she admitted that she was “so bummed”. She also said the public attention surrounding their relationship added pressure to an already difficult situation.
“I think the press aspect and all that makes it feel larger than life in a way,” she explained. “You have to carry this faux cultural importance piece, this extra burden and this extra shame that it didn’t work out.”
Paltrow previously discussed the relationship on the Call Her Daddy podcast in 2023, when she said she called off their engagement because she was not ready to marry.
“It was the right thing at that time, but it was really hard,” she said then. “There were a number of things that had happened, 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.”
She added that she had been “totally heartbroken” after the split and felt she was failing to meet expectations.
Paltrow later married Coldplay frontman Chris Martin in 2003. The couple separated amicably in 2014 and share two children, Apple, 22, and Moses, 20.
She married television producer Brad Falchuk in 2018.
