Gwyneth Paltrow is making a bold return to acting and she is not holding anything back.
The Oscar winner recently opened up about starring opposite Timothée Chalamet in Josh Safdie’s upcoming A24 film Marty Supreme.
The movie, set in the high-stakes world of international ping pong, follows Chalamet as a young protégé competing overseas.
Paltrow plays the wife of a rival player involved in the sport’s shady underworld — the so-called “Ping-Pong mafia.”
Her character forms a complicated and steamy connection with Chalamet’s.
Speaking to Vanity Fair for a new cover story, Paltrow shared the experience of working with Chalamet in the new film.
Paltrow said, “This woman who is married to someone who is in the Ping-Pong mafia, as it were. They meet and she’s had a pretty tough life, and I think he breathes life back into her, but it’s kind of transactional for them both.”
Marti Supreme first grabbed headlines when paparazzi shots surfaced from set, showing Paltrow and Chalamet filming a passionate kissing scene.
According to Paltrow, those images only scratched the surface.
She admitted, “I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie. There’s a lot — a lot.”
For Paltrow, working on the film also marked her first experience with an intimacy coordinator.
While admitting the importance of the role, she confessed she didn’t rely on it much during her scenes with Chalamet.
She recalled, “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed.”
“We said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back.’ I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but…I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Despite poking fun at their age difference, joking, “I’m 109 years old. You’re 14,” Paltrow praised Chalamet’s professionalism.
“He’s just a very polite, properly raised… man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner,” she said, calling him “a thinking man’s sex symbol.”
Paltrow, who last had a major leading role in 2010’s Country Strong, considers Marty Supreme her return to serious acting after years away.
She noted, “It’s different when you’re reprising an ‘Avengers’ thing.”
She also shared that friend and fellow actress Cameron Diaz helped nudge her back to the screen.
Diaz, who recently ended her own acting hiatus, encouraged Paltrow to embrace the vulnerability and depth that come with returning to film after so much life experience.
Paltrow said, “Cameron Diaz is one of my best friends, sorry to name-drop.
“That’s all material…I’ve gone through a lot since the last time I was onscreen in a real way. She’s a movie star. I say that in the cosmic sense.”
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