Gwyneth Paltrow Says She Was Dropped from Film After Announcing Split from Chris Martin

Gwyneth Paltrow says she was fired from a movie after announcing her split from Chris Martin in 2014, during a time when public reaction to their “conscious uncoupling” made headlines.

Gwyneth Paltrow says she lost out on a movie role after the media reaction to her 2014 split from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

In a recent episode of "Good Hang with Amy Poehler," Paltrow said the backlash over how they announced their breakup — famously calling it “conscious uncoupling” — spilled over into her professional life.

Paltrow told Poehler that she had a movie lined up to do shortly after the split was announced. “I was supposed to do a movie at one point and it was like right after the conscious uncoupling thing with Chris, and there was a lot of harsh stuff in the press,” she said.

A film distributor reacted to the intense attention around her personal life at the time. “I think the distributor was like, this might be too hot to touch,” she explained on the podcast.

Paltrow added a bit of sarcasm about the situation, saying, “So that was great because I was getting a divorce and then I got fired off. So it was so awesome.”

Paltrow did not name the movie or the distributor behind the decision.

Back in 2014, Paltrow and Martin took an unusual approach to sharing their breakup. On Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop, they wrote that they were “consciously uncoupling” after nearly a decade of marriage.

The term, which refers to a more mindful and compassionate way of ending a relationship, quickly became a talking point in pop culture.

On the podcast, Paltrow addressed why people at the time reacted so strongly to the phrase. She said the reaction came from how people related to the idea of ending a marriage.

“Say you had had a really nasty divorce, or your parents had had a really nasty divorce. And then you hear this idea that like, it doesn’t have to be done this way,” she said. “I think the implicit learning is like, ‘Oh, [expletive]. Like, they’re saying I did something wrong.’”

Paltrow added that while that wasn’t her intention, she does now understand why it felt personal for many people. “That makes sense to me, like, 'Oh no, is the inference that I mess someone up.' Like, that's not a nice thing to contemplate. So I do understand why it was so personal for people,” she told Poehler.

Paltrow and Martin first met in 2002 backstage at a Coldplay concert, shortly after her father’s death. They married in December 2003 in Santa Barbara, California.

The couple had two children together: daughter Apple Martin, born in 2004, and son Moses Martin, born in 2006.

After nearly 11 years of marriage, they announced their separation in March 2014 with the now‑well‑known conscious uncoupling phrasing. Their divorce was finalized in 2016.

Since then, Paltrow has remarried — she wed producer Brad Falchuk in 2018 — and continued her acting career. While she has occasionally appeared in movies, including returning to a major role after a long break, she joked about taking a decade off from film work following a period where she was in many movies.