Gwyneth Paltrow briefly entered the “nepo baby” discourse in January when she commented on an Instagram post of Hailee Bieber wearing a shirt with the moniker on it and wrote: “I might need a few of these.” Now Paltrow, the daughter of actor Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow and who is an Oscar winner in her own right, entered the discourse more forcefully by telling Bustle the term “nepo baby” is an “ugly moniker.”
“Now there’s this whole nepo baby culture, and judgment that exists around kids of famous people,” Paltrow said when her 19-year-old daughter Apple got brought up. “She’s really just a student, and she’s been very…She just wants to be a kid and be at school and learn. But there’s nothing wrong with doing or wanting to do what your parents do.”
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“Nobody rips on a kid who’s like, ‘I want to be a doctor like my dad and granddad,'” Paltrow continued. “The truth is if you grow up in a house with a lot of artists and people making art and music, that’s what you know, the same way that if you grow up in a house of law, the discussions around the table are about the nuances of whatever particular law the parents practice.”
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“I think it’s kind of an ugly moniker,” she continued about “nepo baby” term. “I just hope that my children always feel free to pursue exactly what they want to do, irrespective of what anybody’s going to think or say.”
The term, short for nepotism baby, went viral in late 2022 due to a New York Magazine cover story on the topic. It prompted many actors who are the children of actors to speak out on the matter. Kate Hudson, the daughter of actors Goldie Hawn and Bill Hudson, shrugged off the term in an interview with The Independent.
“The nepotism thing, I mean… I don’t really care,” Hudson said. “I look at my kids and we’re a storytelling family. It’s definitely in our blood. People can call it whatever they want, but it’s not going to change it.”
“I actually think there are other industries where it’s [more common],” Hudson continued. “Maybe modeling? I see it in business way more than I see it in Hollywood. Sometimes I’ve been in business meetings where I’m like, ‘wait, whose child is this? Like, this person knows nothing!’ I don’t care where you come from, or what your relationship to the business is – if you work hard and you kill it, it doesn’t matter.”
Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, posted on Instagram around the same time that the “nepo baby” discourse is designed to hurt.
“I have been a professional actress since I was 19 years old so that makes me an OG Nepo Baby,” Curtis wrote. “I’ve never understood, nor will I, what qualities got me hired that day, but since my first two lines on Quincy as a contract player at Universal Studios to this last spectacular creative year some 44 years later, there’s not a day in my professional life that goes by without my being reminded that I am the daughter of movie stars. The current conversation about nepo babies is just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.”
When asked about the term for a recent Variety cover story, Ethan Hawke, the father of actor Maya Hawke, quipped, “Put simply, I’m a nepo dad! And I’m not embarrassed about it.”
Head over to Bustle’s website to read Paltrow’s latest profile in its entirety.