Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about her feelings around the “nepo baby” term, which is used for those kids of famous parents. Paltrow is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow and says that label is an “ugly moniker.”
In an interview with Bustle, the idea of helping her daughter Apple, whom she shares with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, came up but Paltrow says “She’s a very private person.”
“Now there’s this whole nepo baby culture, and judgment that exists around kids of famous people,” Paltrow said during the interview. “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.”
She continued, “Nobody rips on a kid who’s like ‘I want to be a doctor like my dad and granddad.’ 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 with law, the discussions around the table are about the nuances of whatever particular law the parents practice. I think it’s kind of an ugly moniker.”
Paltrow said that she hopes her kids “always feel free to pursue exactly what they want to do, irrespective of what anybody’s going to think or say.”
The debate around nepotism in Hollywood is ongoing and earlier this year Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s son Hopper Penn said he didn’t care if people thought he was a “nepo baby” for following his parents’ footsteps. Cindy Crawford’s daughter Kaia entered the modeling world and doesn’t deny the privilege she had to be part of the industry her mother thrived in. “I have a really great source of information and someone to give me great advice, that alone I feel very fortunate for,” Kaia told Elle earlier this year.