After an extended break to raise her kids, run Goop, and look fabulous in a courtroom, Gwyneth Paltrow is returning to acting. Starring opposite Timothée Chalamet in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, Paltrow is (literally) coming back with a bang. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Paltrow revealed that even though this movie is ostensibly about a young Ping-Pong champion, she and Chalamet sure do have a bunch of sex in it.
“I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” Paltrow told the magazine. “There’s a lot — a lot.” The actress went on to describe her character as a woman who is “married to someone who is in the Ping-Pong mafia” whom Chalamet’s character “breathes life back into.” Sounds … hot? Maybe? The “Ping-Pong mafia” thing is giving me pause.
As for her approach to filming all those sex scenes, Paltrow learned about intimacy coordinators for the first time while on set. “There’s now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed,” she told the magazine. She recalled the Marty Supreme intimacy coordinator asking if she was comfortable with a certain move, and she “was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’”
“I don’t know how it is for kids who are starting out, but … if someone is like, ‘Okay, and then he’s going to put his hand here,’” Paltrow explained, “I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that.”
Are we all prepared to endure another Oscars cycle where a major theme is the pros and cons of intimacy coordinators? I’m not, but I am looking forward to Paltrow and Chalamet doing a press tour together. Paltrow had nothing but kind things to say about her co-star, who is 23 years her junior, calling him “a thinking man’s sex symbol.” “He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid,” Paltrow said before correcting herself. “He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.”
Sounds like we are primed for the return of Paltrow in a sexy movie about Ping-Pong. That might be just what the culture needs right now.
