GIVING GWYNETH

Back onscreen with the buzzy Marty Supreme, the Oscar winner and Goop’s high priestess lets loose on getting steamy with Chalamet, surviving internet obsession and embracing her roots — and her dark side

- LACEY ROSE

Now 53, she had agreed to play Kay Stone, a onetime actress who — to the delight of Paltrow’s Mom group chat — is having an affair with Marty Supreme’s titular character, a ping-pong phenom played by Timothée Chalamet. The film’s director, Josh Safdie, had arranged the production schedule so that Paltrow’s first scene would be the character’s return to stage.

“I was shocked to hear her shyly say, almost to herself, ‘I hope I remember how to do this,’ ” recalls Safdie, who insists Paltrow was the Grace Kelly of his youth, as he rattles off her early work in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Great Expectations and The Royal Tenenbaums. “There was a fine line between the vulnerability Gwyneth herself brought to the part and the vulnerability she brought for Kay.”

The daughter of actress Blythe Danner and television director Bruce Paltrow had already won an Academy Award by 26 for her performance in Shakespeare in Love. But once her now-college-age children with ex Chris Martin were born, she stepped back. "She never left the A-list, she just wasn't really responding," says her pal Robert Downey Jr.

Her focus shifted to raising them and, later, to launching and running Goop, a lifestyle company fashioned in her image. Sure, Paltrow still dabbled some as Pepper Potts in Marvel films and later in husband Brad Falchuk's Netflix series The Politician--but her participation in Marty Supreme feels more significant.

An early screening at the New York Film Festival earned rapturous reviews, and its cast is already in the throes of a major awards campaign.