There are all sorts of stories in Hollywood about the roles that certain actors almost played. We know that Will Smith was almost Neo in The Matrix and Robert De Niro recently spoke about how he could have played Hanibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. It turns out Gwyneth Paltrow actually has several stories like that, as she says fans would be shocked at the number of roles she has turned down over the years.
Speaking with Today, Paltrow says that she has been offered “a lot” of roles over the years which she decided to turn down because she was playing the role of mother to her children, Apple and Moses. She decided that was more important at the time to raise her kids than anything she could do on screen. The Oscar winner explained…
There were a lot. I mean, it’s funny, because it didn’t feel like a sacrifice to me at the time. But if I look back at it through a cultural lens, I mean, wow, if people knew I didn’t do this movie or that movie, they’d be quite shocked.
Gwyneth Paltrow refuses to name any of the roles specifically, either because she doesn’t want to talk about the parts she could have played and maybe wishes she’d been able to, or because there is the potential that the actor who played the part might not love it being known they were not the first choice.
Referencing the roles through a “cultural lens” Paltrow seems to be implying that at least some of those roles that she has turned down over the last few years were significant ones, parts in major movies that made a cultural impact when they were released. It would certainly be interesting to learn what some of those parts were and to imagine how the films would have been with Gwyneth Paltrow in them.
While we might be shocked to learn that Paltrow turned down some big roles in big movies, surprised she would walk away from films that were probably expected to be huge, it’s not necessarily that shocking that she was offered a lot of roles. Paltrow won an Academy Award, she has been in major blockbuster films. Paltrow is a star and there are certainly a lot of filmmakers that would love to have her in their movie.
Gwyneth Paltrow never walked away from acting entirely. Even while raising her kids she still had the occasional role, most notably in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where she played Petter Potts in several films, a role that was significant but didn’t usually require a great deal of screen time. In fact, it required so little work on her part that Paltrow seems to forget she was even in the MCU.
Paltrow has said she is retired from acting, and she has no movies on the 2024 release schedule. However, the actress’s youngest child just turned 18 this month, so she is, technically speaking, done raising kids. If she wants to start saying yes to more of those roles, she’ll almost certainly have the chance.