It’s not necessarily new to note that Gwyneth Paltrow operates on a slightly different frequency from many of the fans of the films she’s been in—the zeitgeist-consuming Marvel Cinematic Universe most of all. Paltrow (who was, famously, once totally convinced she hadn’t been in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming) is pretty clearly a fan of doing banter with Robert Downey Jr., and hanging out with Jon Favreau, and much less of a fan of keeping tabs on the larger Marvel machine. That came into yet another round of focus earlier this week, when Paltrow sat down with Vanity Fair for a bit of a career retrospective that touched on her work in the Marvel movies, and seemed genuinely shocked to learn that she’d been in seven of the damn things.
“That can’t be right, I can’t have been in seven,” Paltrow (who was, in fact, in Se7en) responds, when the interviewer brings up her septuple tenure as Pepper Potts. And, look: We know Paltrow is a professional actress, but she seems genuinely flabbergasted by that number (“Is that true?”), even as she brings up the whole “Didn’t know she was in a Spider-Man movie” thing. (For those of you playing along at home: Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame.) She then flawlessly scores extra “Yes, that is what Gwyneth Paltrow would say” points when she’s asked “Do you think you’ll end up in Brave New World?”—the interview having apparently been filmed before the latest Captain America movie came out—only to respond with an instant, apparently guileless “What is that?”
Paltrow does put up a few minor points in her own defense, noting that the intense secrecy surrounding Marvel projects sometimes makes it difficult to know what’s being filmed when. “They think they’re the CIA or something over there,” she notes with genuine amusement. “That’s why I didn’t know I was in Spider-Man, they never said! There were no signs that said Spider-Man, the script didn’t say Spider-Man.” And, hey, what’s Gwyneth Paltrow going to do: Watch a Spider-Man movie she doesn’t even know that she’s in? Never in a million years.
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