Gwyneth Paltrow, 51, was the cover star of the latest issue of PEOPLE and opened up about having a blended family with husband Brad Falchuk, 52. “It’s hard, and it’s not intuitive, and nobody tells you how to do it. You just stick with it,” she said in the interview published online on November 14. “Now it’s one of the things that brings me the most happiness in my life.”
The Oscar winner has two children, Apple, 19, and Moses, 17, with her ex, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, 46, and two stepchildren, Isabella, 19, and Brody, 17, who are from Brad’s previous marriage to Suzanne Bukinik. With daughter Apple in college and son Moses in his senior year of high school, Gwyneth said she’s using the term “free birds” instead of “empty nester” to describe her upcoming status as a parent.
“I’m trying to reframe it so that I can at least try to convince myself there’s some kind of a silver lining. Empty nest sounds so sad and lonely,” she said. The Goop founder went on to say, “I believe that life, especially for women, comes in chapters. This is really going to be a new chapter for me.”
Gwyneth met Brad in 2010 on the set of Glee when Gwyneth was a guest star while Brad was working as a writer and producer on the show. After their respective divorces, the couple went public with their relationship in 2015 and secretly got engaged two years later. They exchanged vows in September 2018 at Gwyneth’s Hamptons, New York estate in an intimate ceremony. At the time, Brad was five years removed from his divorce from his first wife and the mother of his two children.
Before Brad, Gwyneth was married to Chris from 2003 to 2016. After over a decade of marriage, the Iron-Man actress and the “Parade” singer announced they were “consciously uncoupling” in 2014. They finalized their divorce two years later. Since 2017, Chris has been dating Fifty Shades of Grey actress Dakota Johnson, 34. The couple gets along great with Gwyneth and Brad and the foursome has even gone on vacations and spent the holidays together over the years.