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Gwyneth Paltrow is looking back on her instant connection with ex Brad Pitt.
“I got cast in the movie [Seven] with Brad, and I met him on set, and we had kind of a love at first sight thing,” the actress, 53, said during the Tuesday, September 8, episode of the “Friends Keep Secrets” podcast. “It was pretty awesome. It was really fun.”
Paltrow and Pitt, 62, starred in the 1995 crime thriller alongside Morgan Freeman and John C. McGinley. They quickly formed a bond on set and started dating.
“He was so beautiful, and I think he was 31 and I was 22,” she recalled.
At the time, Paltrow was just beginning her career while Pitt was a bonafide movie star. Their romance was her first public relationship.
“I had movies coming out, so I was sort of getting famous on my own, and I was famous as his girlfriend,” she said.
Even before they worked together, Paltrow was a big fan of Pitt.
“I remember seeing Thelma & Louise in the movie theater and [thinking], ‘That is the most handsome man,’” she confessed.
Paltrow and Pitt ended up dating from 1994 to 1997. They got engaged in 1996 but called it off the following year. Paltrow admitted that her age and their busy careers led to the breakup.
“We didn’t get married,” she explained on Tuesday. “I was just young, and we were working all over different parts of the world.”
The Oscar winner shared that she was heartbroken by the split.
“I was so bummed when we broke up, and I think that the press aspect and all that makes it feel larger than life in a way,” she said. “You have to carry this faux cultural importance piece and it’s this extra burden and this extra almost shame that it didn’t work out. It was hard.”
Paltrow added that while her and Pitt’s romance didn’t succeed, the exes still have a lot of “love” for each other to this day.
“I think there was an aspect of it that was very heady. I was very young, and he was this beautiful movie star. But he’s a great guy, and I love him to this day,” she said. “He’s a friend.”
Paltrow ended up tying the knot with Chris Martin. The pair were married from 2002 to 2016 and share daughter Apple, 22, and son Moses, 20. She later found The One with current husband Brad Falchuk.
Pitt, for his part, was married to Jennifer Aniston from 2000 to 2005 and Angelina Jolie from 2014 to 2019. He and Jolie, 51, share six children: Maddox, 25, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 18.
