Gwyneth Paltrow says she made yoga popular: People thought I was 'a crackpot'

When Gwyneth Paltrow started her website-turned-lifestyle empire Goop in 2008, practices such as yoga weren't as prevalent as they are now, and she said in a new interview with WSJ Magazine that she takes some credit for the wellness trend.

“Forgive me if this comes out wrong, but I went to do a yoga class in LA recently and the 22-year-old girl behind the counter was like, ‘Have you ever done yoga before?,' " she recalled. "And literally I turned to my friend, and I was like, ‘(She has) this job because I’ve done yoga before.' "

She said when she started Goop, she was met with negative responses.

"That was the beginning of people thinking I was a crackpot," she told the magazine about the website's founding. "Like, ‘What do you mean food can affect your health, you (expletive) psycho? I remember when I started doing yoga and people were like, ‘What is yoga? She’s a witch. She’s a freak.’ ”

Paltrow, who revealed in September that she married writer/producer Brad Falchuk, discussed in a recent interview with Marie Claire UK how becoming famous changed her – and not necessarily in a good way – when she was a buzzy Hollywood star in the mid-to-late '90s.

"When you achieve the kind of fame that I did by the time I was 25 or 26, the world starts removing all your obstacles because you’re now a 'special person,' ” she said. "You don’t have to wait in line at a restaurant, and if a car doesn’t show up, someone else gives you theirs."

As she realized after, "there is nothing worse for the growth of a human being than not having obstacles and disappointments and things go wrong," she said. "All of my greatest achievements have come out of failure."