‘No one would even look at me’: What really happened on Shallow Hal set, according to explosive Gwyneth Paltrow book

New details about Gwyneth Paltrow's controversial role wearing a fat suit for a film and the subsequent fallout are revealed in a bombshell new book.

New details about Gwyneth Paltrow's controversial role wearing a fat suit for Shallow Hal and crew accounts of her behaviour on set are revealed in a bombshell new book about the star.

Below is an edited extract from the upcoming book Gwyneth by Amy Odell.

EXTRACT:

A macrobiotic diet and so-called clean eating were among the first health fads that seemed to stick to Gwyneth Paltrow and her evolving persona.

“That was the beginning of people thinking I was a crackpot. Like, What do you mean food can affect your health, you f***ing psycho?” she later said. By the time she was doing interviews to promote Shallow Hal, she was espousing the kinds of health theories that would define her next career.

The media generally quoted her without any fact-checking: “I used to drink vodka tonics all the time … but I found that my kidneys got really hard because of it, and I noticed that my liver wouldn’t drop down in my yoga back bends.” (“I don’t think you could say there’s some physiological explanation for what she’s talking about,” said infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja.)

A new book reveals the real story behind Gwyneth Paltrow and THAT fat suit in Shallow Hal. Picture: Getty Images

Gwyneth’s Ashtanga yoga routine involved getting up at 4am six days a week for an hour and forty-five minutes of practice.

“I never skip it unless I’m ill,” she said. She’d bring two yoga instructors with her on location shoots. While all of this was going on, she was spending her working hours in a fat suit.

By the time Gwyneth showed up on the set of the Farrelly brothers’ Shallow Hal in 2000 with her strange diet requests and intensive workout schedule, she was ready to cultivate the irreverent side of her personality, the fun-loving mischief maker. But the people around her were still seeing elitist Gwyneth.

Before filming began, 120-pound Gwyneth slipped into a rubbery, twenty-five-pound fat suit.

It came in six pieces — one that zipped over her torso, one that slipped over her legs like shorts, two calf pieces, and two gloves — plus a face that was essentially glued to hers, and was meant to make her look like she weighed 350 pounds.

She planned to walk around downtown Charlotte, North Carolina (where the movie was filming) without an entourage or full camera crew, to experience what her high school yearbook had called her “worst fear” — obesity.

Gwyneth slipped into a rubbery, twenty-five-pound fat suit to film Shallow Hal. Picture: AFP

None of the pedestrians knew that a major movie was in their midst. They mostly ignored her, or skirted around her body like an obstacle dropped in their path. Barry Teague, a line producer, had been instructed to stay close, but to keep enough of a distance so that she felt like she was alone.

Teague, who weighed 325 pounds himself, felt pained as he watched the scene play out before him.

She moved more slowly than everyone else and blocked most of the width of the sidewalk. Pedestrians couldn’t step off the curb to pass by because cars were parked, so they had to squeeze around her single file on the other side.

Teague watched two attractive, middle-aged men hurry around her like she was a trash can, without saying “excuse me” or regarding her at all.

A pair of teenage girls gawked as she passed, then giggled to each other as she walked away. She did the walk a few times.

Teague watched her stop at a hot dog stand and noticed how impatient the crowd behind her got, seemingly for no other reason than her being fat.

Gwyneth Paltrow with co-star Jack Black in a scene from the controversial film, Shallow Hal.

After 20 minutes of walking around town this time, she called it quits. The exercise seemed too distressing for her to finish. Teague said, “It was difficult to watch.”

Before Gwyneth got to Charlotte, she had done a test run in New York. The crew dressed her in the fat suit in a room at the Tribeca Grand hotel and sent her to the bar to see if anyone could recognise her.

“No one would even look at me,” she recalled. “If I was walking by a table, you know how naturally you just glance up.

“But people would see that I was heavy in their peripheral vision and not look, because I think they assume that’s the polite thing to do. It was incredibly isolating and really lonely and sad … I didn’t expect it to feel so upsetting,” she said.

“I thought the whole thing would be funny, and then as soon as I put it on, I thought, well, you know, this isn’t all funny.”

Gwyneth had a sign made for her trailer that read “Kate,” seemingly as a decoy, even though the only people coming near it were crew who knew she was inside. She wasn’t chummy. She didn’t rush to make conversation, and she let her attention drift if the topic did not interest her. She seemed out of her element.

Gwyneth Paltrow, centre, wearing the so-called ‘fat suit’ in Shallow Hal.

The actress also shot scenes for Shallow Hal without the fat suit.

“Sometimes she felt like she was maybe more talented or more in-demand than other people, and you could see that,” said Teague.

“You could hear her eyes rolling sometimes.” When she finished a scene with an actor she didn’t like who had a bit part in the film, she walked away poking a finger in her mouth, miming throwing up.

During some scenes, Gwyneth wore a short skirt but chose not to wear anything underneath.

One of the camera operators went over to her dresser, Cookie Lopez. “Cookie, she’s flashing us. You might want to tell her to sit differently.”

Lopez looked at him and said, “There’s nothing I can do.” He said, “You don’t want to tell her so she can change what she’s doing?” Lopez replied, “If she likes doing that, I can’t get her to stop.”

Another day, the crew watched her riding around set on one of the electric scooters they used to get around, wearing only the bikini that was her costume for an upcoming scene.

Though she never liked her legs, she struck one crew member as “very, very comfortable in her own skin.”

Compared to other Farrelly brothers film stars, Gwyneth was remote. Renee Zellweger joined the Me, Myself & Irene cast and crew at a skating party.

Jim Carrey, who starred in Me, Myself & Irene and Dumb and Dumber, threw the Irene crew a dance party on a boat.

Gwyneth ordered an ice cream cart for the set and had her assistant push it around saying, “It’s from Gwyneth, it’s from Gwyneth.”

New details about Paltrow’s behaviour on set are revealed in an explosive new book, Gwyneth. Picture: AP

The crew was surprised — not that the gesture was comparatively small but that Gwyneth had done anything at all.

When a technician died suddenly during filming, cast and crew contributed to a fund for his widow and children.

The person in charge of collecting the money was telling colleagues one day how much they had amassed; Gwyneth overheard and asked them what they were talking about.

One crew member signalled another not to tell her, sensing that Gwyneth wasn’t someone who should be requested to donate. Later, someone overheard Luke Wilson, who had visited the set, tell her, “The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

Even by the relatively permissive standards of 2002, Shallow Hal generated controversy for using fatness as a punch line.

Gwyneth told friends and some of the crew that she felt like the film could bring attention to what would later be widely termed fat-shaming, which she experienced for the first time in her life in the fat suit.

But that’s not exactly where the discourse landed.

“If you’re overweight and you see this movie, you’re going to be disturbed. To be honest, I was uncomfortable throughout the whole movie,” singer and talk show host Carnie Wilson told USA Today.

The Oscar-winner was criticised for her role in Shallow Hal, which advocacy groups said made fun of overweight people. Picture: AFP

“It made me feel like I was a big joke, and that crushes my heart.” Advocacy groups agreed. “It’s making horrible fun of fat people, and that is still acceptable in our culture,” said Miriam Berg, president of the non-profit group Council on Size & Weight Discrimination. “Would it be acceptable to make the same kind of joke about a person in a wheelchair or a person of colour? No.”

Sandie Sabo, spokeswoman for the five-thousand-member National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, told The New York Times, “If Gwyneth Paltrow had decided to make a movie about the African-American experience, and she portrayed herself in blackface makeup, and yet her quote-unquote inner beauty was perceived as white, I don’t think people would put up with that … Maybe that will help people understand.”

Despite the backlash, the film fared fairly well in reviews and opened third at the box office, with first-weekend ticket sales of US$23.3 million.

It would go on to gross $141 million worldwide on a US$40 million budget. Gwyneth did her best to respond to the controversy, but her well-intentioned innocence sometimes floundered on the spot.

Matt Lauer asked her on the US Today show if the film made fun of fat people. “No. I wouldn’t have done it if that was the intention. You know, and I, I was concerned, I thought, ‘Well is this going to be — is this going to be making fun of, of heavier people?’

“But it really doesn’t. I mean — and actually the film is really — it ends up being a love letter to, to people who are overweight.

“It’s like finally a film for people who are overweight, and, and, and it’s — it’s really a love letter,”she said. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, she said, “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.”

Gwyneth had never seen the movie as mocking fat people and was disappointed that it hadn’t ended up being her Charlie’s Angels, though it was commercially successful. (Angels earned around $120 million more on the same budget.) But the backlash didn’t seem to bother her all that much. She simply moved on to her next project.

This is an edited extract from Gwyneth by Amy Odell ($36.99, Allen & Unwin), out Tuesday August 5.