Gwyneth Paltrow Had “Major Chemistry” With Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck Was “Technically Excellent”

Alex Cooper, host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, is the new Howard Stern, reformed shock jock, in the way she gets people like Gwyneth Paltrow, proficient skier, to talk about people like Brad Pitt, star of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” And not just talk about Brad Pitt, but talk about sleeping with Brad Pitt versus sleeping with another paramour from her past, Ben Affleck, Boston’s best boy. 

Early in the interview, Cooper sets up a game called “Brad or Ben,” and Paltrow answered immediately, “Brad.” And then the game commenced. Cooper asked who’s better in bed, which stumped Paltrow for a moment.

“That is really hard,” Paltrow said. “Because Brad was, like, the sort of major chemistry, love of your life at the time.”

“And then Ben was, like, technically excellent,” Paltrow clarified. “I can’t believe my daughter is listening to this!”

They played a game of “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” adding in Paltrow’s ex-husband, Chris Martin. Paltrow said she would marry Martin again since he gave her their kids, Apple, who came to the taping with her, and Moses.

“I think Brad,” Paltrow said of shtupping her former fiancé. And Ben? “Ben, yeah, God bless him.”

Somebody has read their Vanity Fair. 

Paltrow also shared that Pitt had been a major love in her life that began right when they met on the set of Seven. It was “major, major love at first sight,” Paltrow said. “It was crazy.” 

In 1996, while Pitt was filming Seven Years in Tibet in Argentina, they got engaged. “One night we were on the balcony of this house we were renting in this little town in Argentina,” the Goop CEO said. “I wish I remembered exactly what he said, but he proposed, it was fantastic, I was thrilled.… We had talked about it, but I was surprised in the moment, I remember that.… I must have been 24.”

Six months later, Paltrow called it off, explaining to Cooper that she “had a lot of development to do, looking back in hindsight. In a lot of ways, I didn’t really fully start to come into myself until I was, like, 40 years old. And I had such a pleasing issue. I didn’t really even understand how to listen to my instincts and act from that place for what was right for me. I was always trying to adjudicate what’s right for everyone else.”

“When I look back, I was really a kid, really more so than a lot of 22- or 23- or 24-year-olds I would meet now,” she added. “I really had not explored who I was, what was important to me, what my boundaries were.”

But she was “totally heartbroken when we broke up,” she said. “It was the right thing at that time, but it was really hard…. There were a number of things that had happened, and also, he was nine years older than me, so he was far more…he knew what he wanted, he was ready to do it, and I was kind of all over the place. So it was really one of those difficult things, where I felt like, Oh, my God, not only am I not ready, but I’m not living up to the standards again. It was a familiar refrain I felt about myself.”

Though her chat with Cooper was her first major sit-down interview since her success in the courtroom against a disgruntled skier, Paltrow and Cooper did not discuss the slopes. Besides early relationships, they covered divorce, raising children, vibrators, and the many misconceptions about Gwyneth Paltrow.