14 DAY TRIAL // Actors, because of their line of work, are self-centered, narcissistic, self-involved and, some more than others, delusional and entitled beyond words. While I’ve come to expect odd statements from many of them, never before have I been so stunned as I was this week, when Gwyneth Paltrow flat-out said that her life was more difficult and more challenging than that of a mother who works a 9-to-5 office job.
And I’m not even a mom yet, so I can only imagine how they must feel.
I was saying, celebrities always think of themselves as one step above everyone else and, if you think about it, it makes sense for that to happen because they live in a bubble and are surrounded exclusively by “yes people.” Unlike you and me, they don’t know the meaning of wanting and not having, or of having to work really hard to have the money to get something.
To each their own, I say: they do make sacrifices for fame and they do work hard, so if that’s the life they choose and they’re good at what they do, for all I care, they can have the moon in the sky wrapped in a pretty pink bow, if they can afford it. I don’t hate them for feeling special because, in a way, they are – and they’re told that every single minute of every single waking hour in their life: by the fans, by the media, by critics, by their “yes people.”
What I don’t understand and don’t like is when they step up, get up on a soapbox, and make statements that paint them as either gods or superhumans, or when they feel the need to compare to us regular folks, paradoxically in a bid to make themselves more relatable to us.
Mark Wahlberg, for instance, said once that, if he’d been on one of the 9/11 planes, the tragedy would have never happened because he would have fought the terrorists with his bare hands. Seriously, he did say that. Later, he compared shooting a war movie to the work that real-life SEALs do abroad.
Tom Cruise too was once rumored to say that fighting in Iraq and shooting a movie about wars against aliens was no different. His rep went the extra mile to deny he ever said that, but all he did instead was confirm that Cruise had actually compared himself to an athlete training for the Olympic Games.
And here’s Gwyneth now, telling moms all over the world, some of whom are part of the makeup of her huge fanbase, that she should be so lucky as to hold a 9-to-5 office job because she has it so much harder as an actress. We can’t even begin to imagine the hardships this woman has to face getting up in the morning, going to work (she shoots a maximum of one movie a year) and raising her 2 kids with Chris Martin.
“It’s much harder for me. I feel like I set it up in a way that makes it difficult because… for me, like if I miss a school run, they are like, ‘Where were you?’ I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening. When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set,” Paltrow said.
I never understood before why Gwyneth had the reputation of being one of most insufferable actors in Hollywood, even though I duly raised an eyebrow when she suggested on her Goop website that I freshen up my spring wardrobe with a basic cotton long-sleeve tee costing $150 (€110), as if money grew on trees in my part of the world. Or when she proposed a “basic” recipe for a sweet treat that ended up costing more than an entire 3-course meal at a fancy restaurant.
Gwyneth has long been trying to convince the world that she is, at the end of the day, a woman just like any other, but the bottom line is that she’s not. Gwyneth was born into money and broke in the industry because her parents pulled all the strings they could to get her jobs. That’s not to say that she isn’t talented or that she’s somehow “worse off” for being rich, but these are the facts to prove that she is not like regular women.
Comparing herself to one and, even worse, saying that she has it much harder than one is the ultimate example of delusion. No one hates Gwyneth for selling overpriced t-shirts or for pushing recipes for sweets no one but her friends would actually afford to make: the world finds her absolutely insufferable because she keeps insisting that she’s no different than us.
Statements like the one above will never win her any new fans by making her more relatable, they will only alienate existing fans by making her come across as condescending. In an industry where image is everything, Gwyneth would do better to hire someone to handle her image and filter her comments, because she’s not doing too great a job herself.