Gwyneth Paltrow has described her 1990s romance with Brad Pitt as “overwhelming”, reflecting on the relationship and their abandoned engagement in a new podcast interview.
The Oscar-winning actor, 53, said she was very young when she began dating Pitt, 62, after meeting him while filming Se7en. The pair started their relationship in 1994, became engaged in 1996 and separated the following year.
“I was very young and he was this beautiful movie star,” Paltrow told Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast.
Recalling their first meeting, she said: “I met him on set and we had kind of a love at first sight thing. It was pretty awesome. It was really fun.”
Paltrow said the demands of their careers added to the intensity of the relationship, as the couple worked in different parts of the world while their romance attracted growing public attention.
Asked whether the relationship had felt more like a fantasy than reality, she replied: “There was an aspect of it that was very heady.”
Despite the painful split, Paltrow said she remains friends with Pitt and spoke warmly about her former fiancé.
“He’s great. I love him,” she said, adding that she had been “so bummed” when they ended their engagement.
She also reflected on the pressure placed on celebrity relationships, saying the media attention could make a private breakup appear far more significant than it was.
“You have to carry this faux cultural importance piece, this extra burden and this extra shame that it didn’t work out,” Paltrow said.
The actor has previously spoken about Pitt in connection with the relationship’s aftermath. In 2023, she compared him with another former partner, Ben Affleck, during an appearance on Call Her Daddy.
Asked who had been better in bed, she said Pitt represented the “major chemistry love” of her life at the time, while Affleck was “technically excellent”. She also praised both men as talented actors, but said that, judging acting alone, she would probably choose Pitt because of the range of roles he had played.
Paltrow later married Coldplay frontman Chris Martin in 2003. They had two children, Apple and Moses, before divorcing in 2016.
She married television writer and director Brad Falchuk in 2018.
