NEED TO KNOW
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez agree that periodic breaks from social media are necessary.
The stars sat down for the Los Angeles Times’ The Envelope 2025 Oscar Actresses Roundtable along with Emily Blunt, Tessa Thompson, Elle Fanning and Sydney Sweeney.
At one point in the wide-ranging conversation, Paltrow, 53, and Lopez, 56, shared their approaches to handling online negativity and reviews of their work.
“I try to never read anything about myself. Full stop. Ever. Period,” said Marty Supreme actress Paltrow.
Lopez, who stars in the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, asked Paltrow, “Wait, not anything about yourself? Ever? Period? Because I don’t read reviews of my films either, but people will bring it to you it when it’s good and you’re like, ‘Oh, nice.’ But there’s other things they’ll bring you….”
Paltrow replied, “Sometimes I’ll come upon it,” and Lopez joked, “And you want to die.”
“Want to die!” Paltrow agreed. “Like when someone forwards you a link to something really horrible about yourself, and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is bulls—.’ I do try to avoid [that kind of stuff]. I deleted Instagram.”
Blunt, 42, said, “Me too,” and Lopez said, “You need to cleanse every once in a while.” Sweeney, 28, though, admitted, “Sounds nice. I can’t do that.”
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Paltrow and Lopez also spoke during The Envelope roundtable about their experiences being misunderstood during their careers when they began venturing out beyond acting.
“When I stepped back to be an entrepreneur around 2008, I really confused and upset people,” said Goop co-founder Paltrow. “Nobody understood what I was doing, and I faced a lot of criticism and confusion over the course of the 17 years since I sent out my first Goop newsletter.”
“I really do think that women, we are so incredibly multifaceted,” she continued. “We are all the archetypes. We’re not just a mother, or an artist, or an intellectual. We’re all the things. So I’ve always kind of tried to make it my mission to say, like, ‘No, don’t put us in boxes. We get to define who we are.’ ”
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Paltrow recalled that the judgment was “really hard” and she questioned the pivot at the time.
“Some days I was like, ‘Why did I do this? The headwinds are so extreme and I’m so misunderstood. I had a perfectly good job. People did my hair. Why on earth did I do this to myself?’ ” she said.
Added Lopez, “Even when I started acting and I had done my early films, Out of Sight and Selena, and then decided I wanted to record music, and it was such a big deal. People were like, ‘They’re never going take you seriously as an actor ever again.’ ”
Paltrow told her, “And you had the No. 1 movie and the No. 1 album in the same time, right?” (In February 2001, Lopez’s album J. Lo topped the charts as The Wedding Planner sat at No. 1 at the box office.)
The Los Angeles Times
“But that’s the thing,” said Lopez, “everybody’s always trying to tell you: ‘You can only do this,’ or ‘You can only do that.’ I had my perfume line. I had my clothing lines. I have my J Lo beauty now. You have to just do what feels good for you. It doesn’t mean it’s for everybody. Somebody wants to just act their whole life, that’s beautiful too. That’s fantastic.”
Lopez added, “I still want to direct. I still want to write more books. And I don’t ever feel like there’s somebody who can say to me, ‘No, you can’t.’ “
