Gwyneth Paltrow says Brad Pitt was 'too good for me'

Gwyneth Paltrow has opened up about her former boyfriends Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt.

Gwyneth Paltrow has opened up about her romances with Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck, insisting one was too good for her while the other wasn't "in a good place".

The actress, who split from husband Chris Martin last year after 14 years of marriage, said she was madly in love with Pitt.

"He was so gorgeous and sweet. I mean, he was Brad Pitt..." she said in candid chat with US radio host Howard Stern.

"(But) I was such a kid - I was 22 when we met.

"It's taken me until 40 to get my head out of my ass. You can't make that decision when you're 22 years old... I wasn't ready, and he was too good for me... I didn't know what I was doing."

Paltrow and Pitt met on the set of Seven in 1995 and dated for almost three years - the same amount of time as her romance with Affleck in the late 1990s.

She doesn't have as many fond memories about that coupling.

"He was not in a good place in his life to have a girlfriend.

"I think that when you're in your 20s, you can get swept up...

"When you're a kid, you tend to be more shallow and you're also immature, so you think that being with a good looking person validates yourself in some kind of way.

"It's not true."

Her parents also made it clear they weren't convinced Affleck was the guy for her.

I think they appreciated how he's super intelligent and he's really talented and funny.

"They loved him, but they were OK with us not being together."

-AAP