Gwyneth Paltrow recalls being Brad Pitt's girlfriend: ‘Overwhelming'

Gwyneth Paltrow is walking down the memory lane.

The Oscar winner, 53, joined Benny Blanco, Lil Dicky and Kristin Batalucco on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast to talk career, fame, and her past relationship with Brad Pitt.

The music director, 38, brought up Pitt, 62, and Paltrow opened up about how it all started on the set of Se7en. She said she was about 22 at the time, and Pitt was 31.

“I met him on set and like we had like kind of a love at first sight thing,” she recalled. “It was pretty awesome. It was really fun.” But when things ended, the fallout felt bigger than just a breakup.

“When they did break up, she was “so bummed,” Paltrow said.

“I think the press aspect and all that makes it feel larger than life in a way,” she said. “You have to carry this faux cultural importance piece, this extra burden and this extra shame that it didn’t work out.”

Paltrow has been honest about the split before. Earlier, in 2023 on Call Her Daddy podcast, she said she ended their engagement because she wasn’t ready for marriage.

“It was the right thing at that time, but it was really hard,” Paltrow explained at the time. “There were a number of things that had happened, he was nine years older than me — he knew what he wanted, he was ready to do it and I was kind of all over the place.”

She added: “So it was really one of those difficult things, where I felt like, ‘Oh my God, not only am I not ready, I’m not living up to the standards again.’ It was a familiar refrain I felt about myself,” she added. 

She also admitted she was “totally heartbroken when we broke up.”

After Pitt, Paltrow married Coldplay’s Chris Martin in 2003. The two split amicably in 2014 and co-parent Apple, 22, and Moses, 20. In 2018 she married producer Brad Falchuk.

Decades later, the actress is still reflecting on how young love and tabloids made the chapter “larger than life.”