TBT: Chris Martin Said Marrying Gwyneth Paltrow Was Like "Winning the Lottery"

“From being a loser to going out with an Oscar winner? It's a giant leap."

Who:  Grammy-winning musician and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, 45, and Oscar-winning actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow, 49.

How They Met: Some may call it fate, while some might consider it the power of manifestation. But either way, Gwyneth and Chris met only after he already told thousands of fans she was his girlfriend at a Coldplay concert in 2002.

"It's funny because people had started writing that we were going out and we had never even met," Paltrow revealed in 2013. "And then he was in Los Angeles doing a concert, and an actress that he had a crush on was supposed to come to the concert. When she didn't show up, he was so annoyed that he said, 'Oh, this is for my girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow.'"

She continued, "Then people were saying, 'What's going on?' I was like, 'I've never met this guy, I've no idea!' And because of that, because people were writing about it, we ended up meeting at a concert, and there you go. So, thank you! Because they had written so much in the press, his assistant came to my seat at the concert. They said, 'This is so crazy, but will you come back and say hello afterwards?' And that was it."

Within a year of their first meeting, Gwyneth was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Apple Martin, (they also share a son, Moses), and days after they were famously photographed outside the doctor’s office celebrating the news, they secretly got married in Santa Barbara, Calif.

In 2011, Chris compared marrying Gwyneth to “winning the lottery” during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning revealing that she was his only serious relationship. “From being a loser to going out with an Oscar winner? It’s a  giant leap,” he admitted, adding: “Let’s face it. It’s like winning the lottery.”

Why We Loved Them: While most celebrity couples like to say they want to stay out of the spotlight, Gwyneth and Chris actually meant it. For 12 years, they never gave a joint interview or even walked a single red carpet together. "It doesn't behoove us to be a public couple," Paltrow explained to Elle UK in 2009. "[Chris] certainly doesn't want that. We've never ever walked down a red carpet together, and we never will."

That same year, Chris echoed Gwyneth’s point further while speaking with 60 Minutes. "If you talk about your family life, then the amount of people who hang around outside your house triples the next week,” he said. “Because then you become a necessary story in those magazines. So the aim is to make yourself not necessary."

When They Peaked: The time they broke their own PDA rule at a Coldplay concert in 2012.

In the middle of the show, Martin ran into the crowd between songs to plant a kiss on Paltrow, who seemed just as surprised as everyone else in the audience by the rare publicly romantic moment.

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The Breakup: In 2014, Paltrow and Martin announced they were separating, or as Gwyneth iconically put it, “consciously uncoupling.”

Paltrow shared the news in a blog post on her lifestyle website, Goop. "It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate," she began the breakup announcement, which ended up crashing the site. "We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much, we will remain separate. We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways, we are closer than we have ever been.”

She added, “We are parents, first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children, and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time. We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and co-parent, we will be able to continue in the same manner."

In addition to rebranding the boring, old breakup, Gwyneth and Chris also wrote the handbook on how to be a modern-day divorced couple.

Following the divorce, Paltrow and Martin remained on good terms. So much so, in fact, that they still went on vacations and celebrated holidays together, lived across the street from each other at one point, and hung out with each other’s new significant others — in Paltrow’s case, without Martin even there.

Where They Are Now: Martin has been in a long-term relationship with actress Dakota Johnson since 2017 — three years after his split from Paltrow. Like his relationship with Paltrow, Martin likes to keep his romance with Johnson low-key. The two, however, did reach a major relationship milestone recently and moved in together after buying a house in Malibu in 2021.

Professionally, Martin is still very much focused on music. Following his breakup with Gwyneth, the band came out with five albums, and most recently, they dropped a new single, "Biutyful." Right now, Martin and his bandmates are on a world tour titled, Music Of The Spheres.

Paltrow is married to Emmy-winning writer Brad Falchuk. The pair first met in 2014 when Gwyneth guest-starred on the TV show Glee, which Falchuk co-created with Ryan Murphy, but they didn’t start dating until a year later. They got engaged in 2017 and married in 2018 in Amagansett.

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Gwyneth shifted her career from actress to lifestyle guru when she founded Goop in 2008. And while she still stars in the occasional film ( The Avengers, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Iron Man 3), her main focus is on building her health and wellness brand. In 2020, Gwyneth explained why she took a step back from acting, admitting: "It's just not who I am."

#TBT: Check in every Thursday as we throw it back to some of our favorite celebrity couples of all time.