Gwyneth Paltrow Crushed on Brad Pitt Watching Thelma & Louise, Then Got Cast Opposite Him in Se7en and Had “A Love At First Sight Thing” on Set

09 Sep 2026, 07:00 · Thought Catalog

Brenda Chase / Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Updated 40 minutes ago, September 9, 2026

She was 22 and he was 31 when they met on the Se7en set, and she was already a fan. “We had kind of a love at first sight thing,” she says. “It was pretty awesome.”

The crush started in a movie theater, years before Gwyneth Paltrow ever met Brad Pitt. She watched him in Thelma & Louise and thought, “That is the most handsome man.”

Then she got cast opposite him in David Fincher’s 1995 thriller Se7en, playing his wife, and the two connected instantly. Paltrow, 53, told Benny Blanco and Lil Dicky on their Friends Keep Secrets podcast that the age gap never fazed her: “No, because he was so beautiful. I think he was 31 and I was 22.”

The Los Angeles premiere of ‘Copycat’ in 1995 drew Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt to the red carpet together, marking one of the pair’s first public outings as a couple. Photo by Brenda Chase / Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

They got engaged in 1996 and never made it down the aisle. “We were working all over the different parts of the world,” she said. “I was very young, and he was this beautiful movie star.”

Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow step out together, she in a silky white double-breasted coat and he in an open linen shirt, at an undated event during their mid-1990s relationship. Photo by Diane Freed / Hulton Archive via Getty Images.

Pitt, 62, is still a friend. “He’s a very intriguing character,” she told Vanity Fair. “Like having dated, I don’t know, Prince William or something. That’s always going to come up.”

At the 68th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 25, 1996, Brad Pitt — nominated for Best Supporting Actor for ’12 Monkeys’ — leaned in close to Gwyneth Paltrow outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Photo by Kim Kulish / AFP via Getty Images.

She married writer-producer Brad Falchuk in 2018 and calls him “the total love of my life.”

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