It's hard to keep track of which A-list celebrities have dated over the years – if we tried to map them all out on a whiteboard it would quickly descend into one large, indecipherable squiggle. Somewhere in the midst of it you would find the young, blonde 'It' couple, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, who dated between 1994 and 1997.
Their lives, careers and subsequent marriages have so far eclipsed their relationship that it's easy to forget it ever happened. They met during a reading for the film Legends of the Fall in 1994 and went on to star in the crime thriller Se7en the following year. Paltrow and Pitt even got engaged in December 1996, but broke up six months later. During her recent interview with Vanity Fair, Paltrow revealed that she looks back on that period with mixed memories.
In terms of her career, she recalls stretching herself during the mid-90s and taking on project after project without much consideration for how it was affecting her physically and emotionally. 'I was really disenchanted with how I was treated for a lot of it,' she said, including 'the disparity between male costars and all that, which now sounds cliché, but it’s really true and it’s hard to live'.
Paltrow remembers one shoot in the English countryside when she was working 20-hour days, six days a week, unaware of the labour laws that should have protected her, and was sometimes called back to film four hours after wrapping.
On one occasion, her boyfriend at the time, Pitt, was over to celebrate her birthday. She had asked for a 12 hour turnaround between filming and said one of the producers granted it but 'made me feel like I was the most entitled…' before trailing off. 'It was such a horrible feeling,' Paltrow added. She imagined him 'crafting a story that I’m being difficult…and of course you didn’t say anything, because you could already tell that the guy with the power was like, "I don’t like what I’m seeing here."'
Whether their gruelling work schedules and burgeoning Hollywood careers had anything to do with their breakup is another question, but Paltrow insists she is still good friends with her ex. 'He's a very intriguing character,' she told the magazine. As for Pitt's star power she said, 'It’s like having dated, I don’t know, Prince William or something. That’s always going to come up.' Speaking on the Call Her Daddy podcast in 2023, when she was asked about their relationship again, Paltrow said Pitt is a 'really great guy' and that she 'likes him a lot' and they broke up because she had 'a lot of development to do'.
The Goop founder claims to be friendly with her ex-boyfriend Ben Affleck too, who she dated from 1997 to 2000, and has remained on famously good terms with her ex-husband Chris Martin since they 'consciously uncoupled' in 2016. She and Martin share two children and often go on holiday together with their new partners, including Paltrow's husband Brad Falchuk who she married in 2018. She describes her ex-husband, in another signature Paltrow-ism, as 'not quite a brother' but 'family'.
While Paltrow is right that Pitt is inconceivably famous – and that journalists are bound to bring up their relationship when they get the chance – his reputation as a Hollywood icon is certainly not as robust or unblemished as it once was.
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across pop culture, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things TV for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow shows with equal respect).