Gwyneth Paltrow Didn’t Know She Was in Spider-Man: Homecoming
Pepper Potts appears to forget she was in Spider-Man: Homecoming, birthing a new meme.
If you’ve had a hard time keeping up with the 22 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, never fear: Even the stars of the sundry films—which include one Spider-Man, four Avengers, three Captain America, three Iron Man, and two Ant-Man installments—occasionally get things a little jumbled.
Take, for example, Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow, who was only pretending to be an actor, has appeared in seven Marvel films: three Iron Man movies; The Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: End Game; and Spider-Man: Homecoming. But based on a clip from pal Jon Favreau’s new Netflix series, The Chef Show, on which Paltrow made a guest appearance, one of those credits seems to have slipped her mind. It’s hard to balance professional responsibilities with being a full-time Instagram mom, after all.
“What is this TV show for?” Paltrow asks, blithely zesting an orange into a bowl. “We don’t really know,” Favreau tells her. “I just started filming. We were actually doing it while we were filming Spider-Man,” he goes on. That’s when the real record-scratch moment happens. “Spider-Man?” Paltrow asks, genuinely bemused. “Well, yeah, we were in Spider-Man together,” Favreau explains—he played Happy Hogan; Paltrow made a cameo reprising her role as Pepper Potts—presumably for the benefit of audience members who might not be familiar with their shared filmography, but apparently also for the benefit of Paltrow, who has no idea what he’s talking about. “We weren’t in Spider-Man,” Paltrow replies. (Her Instagram says otherwise.)
It keeps going like this: Favreau explaining, Paltrow denying she was in the movie. “No,” she says firmly, declaratively. “I was in Avengers.” Until, finally, he describes a particular scene: “That was Spider-Man? Oh, my God,” Paltrow concedes at last. The whole time, she keeps on zesting that orange, blissfully unaware she was in Spider-Man, blissfully unaware this whole thing is going to end up on Netflix. It’s that kind of energetic denial that also allows an Academy Award–winning actor to describe herself as a lifelong film imposter.
May we call it here first: Her Royal Goopness’s “No” is the new “I don’t know her.”
