A few weeks ago, Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler visited The Drew Barrymore Show for what should have been a routine interview within the promotion of mystery in sight, their new movie together. That’s how it was until the presenter began to show signs of nervousness and she revealed to her guests: “I’m very hot. I think I’m having one of the first premenopausal hot flashes.” The clip, which immediately went viral, received praise for the actress’s normalization of menopause, although it also provoked a certain feeling of nostalgia: to those who still see her as the girl from ET they were dismayed to discover that, tempus fugitTime passes for everyone.
Fans of the show, which is in its third season on CBS, weren’t surprised that Barrymore went public with such an intimate affair; that instead of trying to hide it, she would grab the hands of her guests and make them part of that moment (them and the more than a million viewers who follow her daily). Her spontaneous gestures are common: sometimes the actress takes off her shoes and curls up on the sofa, sits on the floor facing her guest as if they were at summer camp, or lies on the floor to be psychoanalyzed by George. Clooney.
If there is a word that is repeated when talking about his show, it is tactile. Also childish. Some of Barrymore’s attitudes have been mocked: moments like her enthusiastic dancing in the rain, as if it were her first time witnessing the atmospheric phenomenon, drew mischievous laughter and a hilarious parody from the comedian. Saturday night Live Chloe Fineman. But they also give off the feeling that if someone has the right to recover her childhood, it is someone who has not had it. “No one is healing their inner child more intensely than Drew Barrymore,” writer Ashley C. Ford tweeted about it. At eleven months Barrymore was placed in front of the cameras for the first time, at seven he was an intentional star and at thirteen she was confined to a mental institution after a suicide attempt.
And on the seventh day…
Of all the resurrections of the actress, that of the star of the talk show of good feelings was the most improbable. But there is something obvious in that evolution. Knowing the texture of the mud has helped her to extract the most intimate aspects of her guests, many of them with experiences similar to hers, such as Jason Ritter, son of John Ritter, who shared his alcoholism problems with her and confessed how they affected his his relationship with his wife, the star of yellowjackets Melanie Lynskey, and his fear of not being good enough for her.
Contrary to what is usual in this type of format, Barrymore did not try to make it more tearful than it already was. Proud, she said that she herself had not gotten drunk for almost four years, something she used to do regularly after divorcing her third husband in 2016: “I’m not in rehabilitation, but alcohol is my poison.” At all times the actress emanates tenderness, fragility and an absolute lack of imposture. Viewers trust her because they’ve seen her grow up, celebrities trust her because they know she’s one say noi and criticism is divided before a show that it considers unclassifiable. “The Drew Barrymore Show it is too chaotic and destabilizing to be faked. The show’s overt sentimentality and abundant tears are offset by its touch of unforeseen awkwardness,” wrote Rachel Syme in The New Yorker. “He is not revisiting his past, but dragging it along like a tether full of lessons waiting to be discovered. If his spontaneity is a performance, then it’s the best performance of his life.”
There is still much of the innocence in Barrymore of the girl who asked ET for a scarf to keep her warm because she thought it was real, as revealed on the show by her mother in the film, Dee Wallace. “We found you talking to ET and notified Steven, who from then on had two guys keep I live for you.” Spielberg was a kind of father to her. To surprise her for her 46 years, the producers of the program made a video call with the director. “I still worry about you. I’ve always cared about you since the first time that little blonde hurricane auditioned in my office and then fell in love with the whole world,” Spielberg confessed to an emotional Barrymore. And he revealed an anecdote that explains her relationship. When she in 1995 she appeared naked in Playboy sent him a montage with a text that read: “Cover up.” “I had an artist come over and make clothes out of paper doll cutouts that I pasted on top of all the nude pictures of him and sent to Drew. A week later, she responded to me with what seemed like an apology, three photographs in which she appeared dressed as a nun that read: ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I’ve seen the light’ and ‘I’m on my way’. Immediately afterwards, he showed the camera that he still has those three images framed and hanging in his house.
screen royalty
ET It made her a celebrity when she was barely seven, but there were already twenty commercials and a couple of movies to her credit. It wasn’t an anomaly in her family. If we talk about Hollywood royalty, the Barrymores would be the equivalent of the Windsors. The saga surname dates back to the 19th century in England. Her grandfather, John Barrymore, was a classic Hollywood legend, as were her uncles Ethel and Lionel. Less recognized is her father, an unremarkable career actor steeped in alcohol and drugs who left home before his birth and with whom he had little contact. Her mother, the Hungarian-born actress Jaid Barrymore, raised her alone, but more than as a parent, she acted as a representative and party partner. “I had a mother, but she acted more like a best friend. She would say to me: ‘Do you want to go to school and have your life miserable or come to Studio 54 with me?’
At the age of 9 he drank, at 12 he snorted cocaine. She has never tried to sweeten his life. During a fight, according to what he recounted in his autobiography Little Girl Lost, her mother called her a “loser”, “asshole” and “bitch” and Drew slapped her. At the age of 13 and after a suicide attempt, her mother sent her to a rehabilitation center. She left him two months later against medical advice, she stole her mother’s credit card and went on a cocaine binge before Jaid hired private security to track her down and bring her back to the clinic. At the age of 15, she was legally emancipated. Her career was over and she made a living bartending and starring in Z-movies.
When it seemed doomed to be the umpteenth broken toy in Hollywood, however, her career took off again and she unexpectedly became a romantic comedy star chaining hits like Forever and ever, the ideal guy and I have never been kissed all little classics from the late nineties. Aware of how fast everything happens, he set up a production company and was wise enough to carry out the highly successful film version of Charlie’s Angels (2000).
Barrymore is now traveling along a path previously trodden by legendary names: the iconic Oprah, a suprasegmental figure who went from poverty to reigning in the morning and sounding like a candidate for the presidency of the United States, or Ellen DeGeneres, who after 19 years of success and 30 Emmy Awards saw his show disappear after allegations of a toxic work environment, racism, and harassment made by program workers.
The Drew Barrymore show aired its first show during the pandemic and revealed itself as a balm in times when cynicism was not listed. It was not exempt from criticism, but in its third season it seems fully consolidated and has left us with a good handful of moments that are as emotional as they are viral. When actor and singer Jordan Fiscer revealed his eating disorder, Barrymore knelt before him and they embraced. An interview as candid as the one he had with Brooke Shields, with whom he shared memories of growing up in front of the cameras, giving up childhood, what “bad mothers” really means, and surviving in an adult world as a child.
Actress and transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, the target of criticism from trans-exclusionary feminists for her ad campaigns for BudLight and Nike, also stopped by Barrymore’s couch. While they talked about her tragic childhoods, the actress knelt before the influencers, a trademark gesture of the house that caused him furious attacks. “Women are now getting on their knees to show solidarity with a man who has lived as a woman for less than a year. Truly the patriarchy’s cleverest trick.” Wrote Greg Price, communications director for the far-right Freedom Caucus.
Barrymore’s ability to open up seems to be endless. She doesn’t hesitate to reveal (and show) that she wears “grandma panties” or talk about her lack of sex. When Andrew Garfield revealed that during the filming of Silence She had maintained six months of sexual abstinence, the conviction with which the actress declared that half a year did not seem like a great milestone to her, led days later to a woman who was in the gym to blurt out: “You look like Drew Barrymore, except that It seems that you’re right in the head and also… she hates sex!
The actress wanted to point out her position and wrote a text on her blog explaining why she has not had sex in recent years. “I’m sure there was a time in my life when six months seemed like a lot, but now I’m on the other side. At almost 48 years old, I have very different feelings about intimacy than I had before. I had no parents to serve as role models and related to people as an adult from a very early age. I was looking for company, validation, excitement, pleasure, hedonism, fun. And adventures! Now, since I can’t go into a time machine and change my story, I choose to look through a positive lens, which is that I survived!”
Barrymore has been married three times: at the age of nineteen and for just 39 days to Jeremy Thomas, a bar owner in Los Angeles; Something else, 163 days, lasted her marriage to comedian Tom Green. With her last husband, Will Kopelman, with whom she has two daughters, she was married for four years and her breakup led her to hit rock bottom, something she has, of course, spoken about openly on the show. her. “I really took the divorce very hard,” she said. She relapsed into alcohol and only the intervention of friends like Cameron Diaz, a constant in her life since they met at the bar where Barrymore used to drink at the lowest point of her career, helped her recover. . She was also essential that the idea of holding a talk show daily appeared on the horizon. That was the definitive impulse to rehabilitate himself. “I think the opportunity to do a show like this really focused me,” she confessed. A reward better than no Emmy.
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