Chioma Nnadi: I went to see Marty Supreme last week, and I think it’s one of my favorite films in a long time. It was so much fun. I think I want to go and see it again. I’m itching to go and see it with friends and family. It was so much fun. I mean, it was very cool for this to be your first major return to the big screen, because it’s such a fab movie. And you said in interviews that you decided to return since your kids are now out of the house. You mentioned that you felt a little bit rusty, but what was particularly challenging for you? Because you didn’t look rusty at all, I must say.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Thank you so much. I think it’s like anything. When you do something a lot and with great frequency, it almost becomes a second skin. It’s sort of that 10,000-hour Malcolm Gladwell thing, and when you have a big break from something that you did with great frequency, it’s like, Wait a minute, do I know how to do this? I was really nervous. I had fear around the idea that I would not be able to sort of — I don’t know. Do I remember how to learn lines? How did I used to get into deep emotion? Is all that stuff still going to be there? And I remember the first day. It was great, because the first day was that scene where we’re rehearsing a play, and I started in the theater, so I felt like, Oh my God, thank God, I’m up here on the boards, working something out. We were working out the scene, so I was like, this is such a perfect blessing, that the way back into this is us trying to work through a scene onstage. And then it started to come back, and then I was like, Oh, okay, I remember how to do this. but I was nervous.
CN: Who did you channel to play the role of Kay? And what did you think when you read the script?
GP: When I read the script, I was like, Wow, this is so original, and how is this going to work? It was so ambitious on the page. All of the breathless kind of scenes in the cab and in the car and trying to get the dog, then juxtaposed with these very human moments, and I just thought, this is really ambitious. How is this director going to pull this off? But I trusted that he absolutely would. I thought a lot about Grace Kelly — sort of a darker, more fucked-up version of Grace Kelly, who had been this big movie star and then stopped to get married and seemed a bit broken after that, in a certain way. [That was] very parallel with Kay: She had this big film career, and then she gets married and she stops, and she’s incredibly broken because she’s given up her dream for some sense of security. And then her son was killed in the war, and she has this deep, deep sadness, which I thought was so intriguing. And also this kind of hardness that comes with being disappointed by life and disappointed by one turn of events after another. But then she still had this vulnerability there, so I just thought she was so interesting to play.
