Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't shy away from a sex scene today. (If you've seen Marty Supreme, you know what her and Timothée Chalamet's characters get up to in a hotel room, in a shower, and on the ground in Central Park.) But towards the start of her career, Paltrow wasn't as comfortable with sex scenes—not because of the acting part, but because of what would happen after the film was released.
As reported by People, Paltrow and Ethan Hawke recently reunited for a video for Vanity Fair in celebration their 1998 romance Great Expectations. In their conversation, the actors and longtime friends revealed that director Alfonso Cuarón pitched a racy scene between them.
"He’s like, 'And then he’s going to go down on you.' And I was like, 'Oh, my god, my father’s going to have a heart attack,'" Paltrow recalled.
Hawke further explained the passionate way the Roma director presented the scene.
"'The camera's going to go down your belly, and then it’s going to go up your breasts, and then it's going to go in your face as you reach ecstasy, and when you reach ecstasy the lights will explode like to the sun!'" Hawke said, mimicking Cuarón's accent. "And I remember Gwyneth was like, 'Alfonso, I'm never going to do that."
As Paltrow mentioned, her reasoning had to do with members of her family eventually seeing the film.
"In my early career, I was really self-conscious about my dad and grandfather seeing this kind of stuff. It really bothered me," the 53-year-old said. "Now I wouldn't care."
Hawke praised Paltrow for having "an awareness of how the business worked and the ways in which those kinds of images could be manipulated" and for how she handled turning down the scene. "You weren’t petulant. You were just saying, 'Look, I'm not going to do this.'"
Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow at a screening of Marty Supreme at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in November 2025.
Paltrow has spoken about filming sex scenes in other interviews recently in relation to her role in Marty Supreme. While making the Josh Safdie movie, it stood out to her how much things have changed on set.
"There's now something called an intimacy coordinator, which I did not know existed," the Oscar-winner told Vanity Fair in March. "I was like, 'Girl, I'm from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera's on.'"
Paltrow said that she and Chalamet both decided that they were comfortable telling the intimacy coordinator, "I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back."
She went 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' ... I would feel, as an artist, very stifled by that."
She added of her intimate scenes with 30-year-old Chalamet, "I was like, 'Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You're 14.'"