The Canberra Times interviewed Drew as Australia prepares for the release of Blended!
The former Hollywood wild-child has settled down to a quiet life.
For someone who was a child star by the age of six, a cocaine addict at 13 and in rehab by 14, Drew Barrymore seems remarkably grounded, balanced and, dare I say it, ordinary. It’s the way the 39-year-old actor prefers it these days. “I’m real. I’m just a normal person,” says Barrymore, who arrives for our interview wearing no make-up, her signature locks hanging loosely and framing her smiling face.
“I just want a quiet life,” the former wild child turned queen of domesticity says convincingly. “I’ve been doing [show business] 38 years and you just get to that point – it’s silly to like fall prey to expectations of people you will never see, or meet or care about. It doesn’t matter what people think.”
Refreshingly, the mother-of-two also refuses to adhere to Tinseltown’s obsession with thinness (“I simply love food”) and cosmetic surgery. “Why is everybody fighting it?” she says of the obsession to never age. “Everybody is looking like a catfish at the moment … I’m desperate not to get on that hamster wheel from hell. It looks psychotic.”
Barrymore was not always this pragmatic, admitting there was a time when she felt enormous pressure to be stick-thin, perfectly preened and wrinkle-free. “I would actually make myself so unhappy to try to fit a mould that I do not fit into,” she says, in a subtle reference to the diet merry-go-round she endured in her 20s. “This is the body God gave me,” she says. “Why fight it? I don’t want to get up at 5am in the f…ing morning and go to the gym.”
We’re in a hotel suite at the Four Seasons in New York for a round of interviews Barrymore is doing for her latest movie, Blended, a romantic comedy in which she co-stars with her regular sidekick, Adam Sandler. The film, shot mostly in South Africa, is about two single parents who, after a disastrous blind date, end up on holiday with their respective children.
Barrymore, whose family joined her during the film shoot, says it was an incredibly fun movie to make with long-term friend Sandler – their on-screen chemistry is infectious. “We have been close for 20 years,” she says. “We both still really care about the films we do and try to bring out the best in each other. We have sort of done a movie [together] every 10 years.”
Barrymore giggles as she recalls how her first two movies with Sandler mirrored her own life. The Wedding Singer was filmed when she was in her early 20s and still navigating the path to love, having divorced bar owner Jeremy Thomas in 1994 after an eight-week marriage. Fifty First Dates was filmed in her late 20s after another short-lived marriage, to comedian Tom Green, in 2001. It lasted five months.
