Something is telling about the fact that one of the projects Gwyneth Paltrow never ended up making was precisely a remake of one of the most celebrated films in Latin American cinema. Secret in Their Eyes was the American reimagining of The Secret in Their Eyes, Juan José Campanella’s Argentine masterpiece that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and remains, for many—and for me—one of the greatest political thrillers ever made. Gwyneth was announced as part of the cast in 2014. Months later, she was replaced. The film was eventually released in 2015, starring Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, and became a textbook example of how Hollywood can drain the moral, political, and emotional force from a foreign original.

But the casting change is not the point. The episode works better as a metaphor. The question is not whether the remake “failed” in comparison with the Argentine film. The question is how, by that point, Gwyneth Paltrow had already become an uncomfortable figure for the industry: no longer just an actress, but a symbol, a complication, a presence that carried more meaning than the roles themselves.

And that may be where her story truly becomes fascinating.

Gwyneth emerged as a genuine talent. She was not a marketing phenomenon: she was an actress who asserted herself early, with a kind of natural elegance that Hollywood has always known how to turn into narrative. She did not simply act—she embodied an idea of the contemporary woman: sophisticated, urban, intelligent, possessing a cultural capital that extended beyond the screen. Her personal life, her relationships, her style—everything became part of the same spectacle. Before “branding” became a ubiquitous term, Gwyneth was already a brand.

Her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love placed her on a near-unreachable pedestal and, paradoxically, into a minefield. In Brazil, the statuette became associated with the narrative that she “took” the award from Fernanda Montenegro; I have always personally felt that the real competition that year was Cate Blanchett, but that is almost beside the point. What matters is that the Oscar crystallized an image: Gwyneth as a controversial winner. From then on, it was no longer only about talent. It was about legitimacy.

She continued to work after that. It is not true that she “stopped” because of a crisis. What changed was the nature of the pressure. After the Oscar, mistakes weighed more heavily than successes. Even when she did succeed—on stage, in Proof, for instance—the acclaim came accompanied by an almost punitive expectation: the next role had to justify the award, the image, the myth. Gradually, her projects stopped aligning with that narrative.

At the same time, her personal life was entering a different phase. Marriage, children, the search for a daily life not governed solely by sets and campaigns. It was in this interval that something emerged that would redefine her relationship with culture altogether: Goop.

When it was born, Goop was not a wellness empire, much less a controversy machine. It was a personal, almost intimate newsletter about lifestyle, food, spirituality, and self-care. The strangeness came quickly. Its tone was unlike anything Hollywood produced: less classically aspirational and more confessional, more authorial. Without consciously planning it, Gwyneth paved the way for what we now call the “influencer,“ not as a celebrity who sells products, but as someone who turns her own subjectivity into a platform.

The problem is that Goop did not remain confined to lifestyle curation. Exaggerations followed, along with pseudoscience, controversial products, and questionable recommendations. The brand became an object of satire and criticism, but also of real economic power. At that point, the actress became something else: a businesswoman who challenged the place traditionally reserved for an Oscar winner. Hollywood, which has always known how to deal with divas, did not quite know how to deal with a star who preferred selling scented candles and wellness discourse to competing for prestige roles.

Her personal trajectory further deepened this ambiguity. The death of her father—a central figure in her formation and her relationship with work—marked a visible turning point. Relationships, marriages, the divorce from Chris Martin announced as “conscious uncoupling” (and relentlessly mocked), all placed her in a realm of exposure that was no longer glamour but public estrangement. Gwyneth herself now admits that she rethought her career and priorities in the wake of these shocks.

Even so, she never disappeared entirely. She appeared in smaller but strategic roles: Glee, where she played with her own image; the Marvel universe, where she became part of one of the biggest franchises in cinema history. These were not prestige roles, but they were presences in global cultural phenomena. She traded centrality for ubiquity.

Then came the controversies surrounding Goop, the industry’s growing unease, and more recently her account of having been “fired” from a project after her divorce for having become a figure deemed “problematic” for studios. It is hard not to see in this a portrait of Hollywood’s logic: it celebrates singularity until the moment it becomes difficult to manage.

And so we arrive at the present. Gwyneth campaigns for Marty Supreme, returns to the awards-season circuit, but is not among the nominees. The gesture is revealing. She no longer seeks the center of the stage, but she does not withdraw completely either. She continues to orbit the industry that consecrated her, and from which, in a sense, she also chose to step away.

In the end, the question remains: Does Hollywood love or hate Gwyneth Paltrow?

Perhaps both. It loves what she represents: the elegant actress, the Oscar winner, the woman who embodied an era of cultural sophistication. It resents what she has become: someone who no longer fits predefined roles, who speaks too openly about what she thinks, about whom she did not want to date, about what she dislikes, and about what she rejects. Gwyneth is sincere, and sincerity in Hollywood is rarely a comfortable value.

What makes her such an interesting figure is not the sum of her films, but the way her trajectory mirrors the contradictions of the industry itself: the obsession with narratives of ascent, the discomfort with women who age outside the script, the difficulty of accepting that a star might choose to be an entrepreneur, a mother, the author of her own image, instead of merely a character.

Perhaps that is why she continues to be a reference, even when she is no longer at the center. Not as a consensus, but as a provocation. And sometimes, that is precisely where relevance lives.