Gwyneth Paltrow Says She Regrets Doing "Shallow Hal"

Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed the one movie she most regrets making, and if you’re at all familiar with the actress’s work, you can probably guess which one it is. In a “BFF Test” for Netflix with her assistant Kevin Keating, Paltrow admitted she wishes she hadn’t starred in 2001’s Shallow Hal.

The ill-advised Farrelly Brothers comedy hasn’t exactly aged well in this age of body positivity. It stars Paltrow (in a fat suit) as an overweight woman who appears as a thinner version of herself to Jack Black’s Hal, who has been hypnotized. As you might expect, all sorts of lazily written hijinks ensue: They go canoeing and she weighs down the entire front end of the boat. She does a striptease for him and her underwear is big. She jumps into a pool and makes an enormous splash. (Get it?! It’s funny because she’s fat!…Sigh.)

In the Netflix segment, Paltrow and Keating take a quiz to see how well they know each other, and Keating is asked what Paltrow’s least favorite performance is. He immediately guesses Shallow Hal, and Paltrow agrees, saying, “Exactly.”

“I’m not sure who told you to do that one, but it wasn’t me,” Keating says in the video. “I wasn’t there working for you. Not around for that.” “That was before your time,” Paltrow responds. “See what happened? Disaster.”

The actress also revealed how she was treated differently while wearing her character’s fat suit. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand and I walked through the lobby. It was so sad. It was so disturbing. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese,” she said. “For some reason the clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible. I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive.”

You can watch the full discussion below.

How well does @GwynethPaltrow's best friend & right-hand man @goop actually know her? pic.twitter.com/zGzOLEX1M9

— Netflix US (@netflix) February 27, 2020