Chris Martin says Gwyneth Paltrow split put him in deep depression: 'It was pretty touch-and-go'
Chris Martin has moved on from his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow — she recently remarried, and he’s happily dating, but not procreating with, Dakota Johnson. But their 2014 “conscious uncoupling” landed the Coldplay frontman in a deep depression that had his team worried.In a new documentary, Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams, Martin talks about their split after nearly 10 years of marriage, two children, and a devastating miscarriage that nearly killed Paltrow. He said that during that period, he felt “completely worthless” and like he was “nothing to anybody.”
“I was just like, ‘I’m a mess,’ really, because I can’t enjoy the great things around me,” he said, according to Entertainment Tonight. “Then, of course, I went through a breakup with Gwyneth. Listen, I’m never going to moan, I’m grateful for everything, but it was pretty touch-and-go.”
Martin’s manager at the time, Phil Harvey, emphasized the seriousness of the star’s depression. “I was worried about him to the extent that I was just really glad to get a text in the morning just to know he was OK,” Harvey said.
Martin doesn’t often speak about his personal life, but in his first interview after the split, given to the U.K.’s Sunday Times in 2016, he said that his severe depression lasted a year. But at that point, two years post-split, “I still wake up down a lot of days,” he admitted. “But now I feel like I’ve been given the tools to turn it around.” He said that Man’s Search for Meaning, Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl’s account of his experiences in a death camp, helped his recovery, and so did Persian poet Rumi’s work “The Guest House.” “That one Rumi poem changes everything. It says that even when you’re unhappy, it’s good for you. It took me a year to get it. A year of depression and all that,” he said.
In that interview, he also made it clear that Paltrow famously announcing they were “consciously uncoupling” wasn’t a process he was dragged into. “You can come at it very aggressively and blame and blame,” he said of their cordial divorce. “Or you can put yourself in the garage, so to speak. Take yourself apart and clean off the bits. Reassemble.”
The two have remained close. In a recent New York Times profile of Paltrow’s business, Goop, Martin was part of the color the reporter included in the story. He came to his ex’s house for music lessons with their kids, Apple and Moses. (At one point, he lived across the street.) However, he was not at her September wedding with Brad Falchuk.
Martin’s current relationship with Johnson is closely watched by the tabloids. At her recent birthday party, they released pink balloons, leading to gossip sites reporting she’s pregnant and expecting a girl. She isn’t.
Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams will be in theaters for one day on Nov. 14 and will then be available for streaming on Amazon Prime starting Nov. 16.
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