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Being Gwyneth Paltrow's Body Double
by Katreen Hardt
A woman I did not know barged into my dressing room and insisted that she was the only person on the set of Great Expectations who had ever seen Gwyneth Paltrow naked. She then told me to take off the light brown terrycloth robe I was wearing (I had nothing on underneath) so that she could get a good look at me. It was the first time that I had ever done any body doubling-it was the first time that I had ever been on the set of a major motion picture-and I must admit, I was a little nervous. As soon as I found out that I got the job (more on that later) I stopped eating. Since the day before I had had nothing but cigarettes and black coffee; I'd had one beer at bedtime to help me fall asleep. Inside my dressing room, the woman I did not know took one quick look at my unclad body, said nothing, and left. Were they having second thoughts? I wondered. After all, I had been hired to do Gwyneth Paltrow's nude scenes based solely on a couple of Polaroids that I had submitted of myself in a bikini. For the next several hours, while I waited for someone to escort me to the film's set, I became increasingly more paranoid of my own physicality. Were my nipples too big? Was my pubic hair the right color? Was my butt too flat to pass as Gwyneth's? Or rather, was my butt too flat to pass as the kind of butt that Gwyneth would want to pass off as her own?
In mid-August of 1996 when Kee Casting, a New York based casting agency, first called and asked if I would be interested in body doubling for Ms. Paltrow (it paid $1000 a day), I was, to say the least, thrilled. I had been on the isle of Manhattan just over a year-waiting tables, mostly-pursuing my career as an actress. And although body doubling had absolutely nothing to do with acting, I saw it as an opportunity to meet people in the movie industry. I also needed the money. Kee Casting then told me, upon receipt of my Polaroids, that they would let me know within a few days whether or not I got the job. A week later, however, when I did not hear from the agency, I called them back myself only to be informed by a rather insensitive male employee that, "They went with someone thinner."
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