Gwyneth Paltrow experienced huge success very early on in her career, winning an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Actress at the age of just 26 for Shakespeare in Love, and was regularly one of the highest-paid talents in Hollywood during her most prolific and lucrative run at the top of the A-list.
However, she’s taken her foot off the gas in recent years and drastically scaled back her workload, instead focusing on the many bizarre products being developed by her Goop company. In fact, seven of her last ten feature film appearances have been as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Pepper Potts dating back to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, and she’s so invested in the role that she famously had no idea she was even in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Having focused her efforts towards other ventures, the 48 year-old seems content with semi-retirement, and revealed in a recent interview the only way she’d consider returning to the screen in any sort of regular capacity.
“I said. ‘I have to be f*cking the writer’. But that’s sort of it, if my husband writes something and he wants me to do it, then I’ll do it. You know, I can never say never and there are a few, I would like to go back onstage one day. I really loved doing theater.”
Unsurprisingly then, Paltrow’s last credit was as a series regular on Ryan Murphy’s Netflix show The Politician, with her husband Brad Falchuk serving as co-creator, executive producer and writer. Of course, Falchuk is a frequent collaborator of Murphy’s dating back to Nip/Tuck, and has also been involved in the prolific showrunner’s Glee, American Horror Story, Scream Queens, American Crime Story, 9-1-1 and Pose.
With Murphy having signed a massive first-look deal with Netflix that’s seen him churn out a huge amount of content in a short space of time, Falchuk’s constant presence in his orbit might indicate that Gwyneth Paltrow could be doing most of her work on the world’s biggest streaming service for the foreseeable future.