There’s just something about Brad Pitt, 56, that makes his exes want to stay friends with him. First Jennifer Aniston, 50, and now, Gwyneth Paltrow. While speaking with Harper’s Bazaar, the 47-year-old actress revealed that she remains tight with her ex-husband Chris Martin, 42, and many of her ex-boyfriends. “One of them is still one of my best friends—one from high school, Tony Woods,” she said. “And I’m friendly with Brad Pitt. I don’t have any really bad blood.”
Gwyneth and Brad were together from 1994 to 1997, and their romance resulted in an engagement. She would call things off since she wasn’t ready for marriage, and the pressures of this high-profile relationship (her first) were too much to handle at the time. After Brad, she was romantically involved with Ben Affleck from 1997 to 2000. She would meet Chris Martin in 2002, marry him in 2003, welcome their daughter (Apple) in 2004, and their son (Moses) in 2006 before announcing their “conscious uncoupling” in 2014. She married Brad Falchuk in 2018. Since splitting from Gwyneth, Brad has famously married Jenifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie, 44, though both relationships have ended in divorce.
“I definitely fell in love with him,” Gwyneth said of Brad while talking with Howard Stern on a 2015 episode of his Sirius XM radio show, per Vanity Fair. “He was so gorgeous and sweet. I mean, he was Brad Pitt. … My father was so devastated when we broke up,” she said. “My father loved him like a son.” She also dished on the pressures of dating Brad Pitt in the 1990s. “I was such a kid,” she said. “I was 22 when we met. It’s taken me until 40 to get my head out of my ass. You can’t make that decision when you’re 22 years old . . . I wasn’t ready, and he was too good for me . . . I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Gwyneth has maintained a strong relationship with Chris, even as he’s developed a relationship with Dakota Johnson, 30. “It’s not like there’s a finish line: ‘Oh, we consciously uncoupled; we’re done.’ It’s a lifelong commitment to constantly reinvent your relationship with your ex, which you do presumably because you have children together. I don’t see a reason to do it if you don’t have children together. Some people do,” she told Harper’s. Of Chris’s new girlfriend, Gwyneth says she loves her.
“I can see how it would seem weird because it’s sort of unconventional,” she adds. “But I think, in this case, just having passed through it iteratively, I just adore her. I always start to think of the ampersand sign—what else can you bring in, instead of being resistant to or being made insecure by? There’s so much juice in leaning in to something like that.