THE TAMING OF THE DREW
Former wild child opens up about the joys of work, friends and, most of all, her ‘baby girls.’
Drew Barrymore gets excited about ideas, work, memories and friends, drops an occasional F-bomb, adores her kids, “these baby girls who are everything in my universe” and wishes “every billboard in the world” carried the message that life begins at 40.
Interviewing Barrymore the morning after Catherine Hardwicke’s dramedy Miss You Already had its world premiere at TIFF — six years since we last spoke when she premiered her feature directing debut Whip It at the fest — skews more toward a quick catch-up with an old friend.
She praises Miss You Already co-star Toni Collette, who plays self-absorbed wild child Milly to Barrymore’s rock-steady Jess, two longtime girlfriends dealing with motherhood, relationships and unexpected tragedy. Miss You Already opens Nov. 6. “I feel like I’ve been like Milly in my life at some points, but I’m much more like Jess now in my life,” says Barrymore, who turned 40 in February.
Her often-tumultuous childhood led to rebellious teenage and young adult years. It’s all out there; a quick Google search, along with the 1990 autobiography Little Girl Lost, details everything.
“Little Girl Lost is a let-me-try-to-put-my-life-back-together written by, honestly, another man (Todd Gold). He did the typing, I did the talking,” says Barrymore.
She’s written her own story now, a series of essays and reflections on various stages of her life called Wildflower, due out Oct. 27. An early version of the book peeks out from her tote bag, the pages dog-eared from Barrymore’s proofreading.
“I think you will be very surprised,” Barrymore says of Wildflower. “I’ve always wanted to write and I never had the discipline or the objectivity to write in the way I was able to do. It’s also light; you can check into it, it’s unchronological. It’s a shuffled deck. It goes from (age) 5 to 35 to 7 to 18.”
If the title sounds familiar to Barrymore fans, it’s because it namechecks Flower Films, her movie production company started in 1995 with Nancy Juvonen, as well as her Flower Beauty cosmetics line and Flower Eyewear.
Married since 2012 to art consultant Will Kopelman, the couple has two daughters: Olive, soon to be 3, and Frankie, 17 months.
Motherhood brought changes for the child star of 1982 hit E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as well as Charlie’s Angels, The Wedding Singer and Batman Forever. She’s pulled back from acting to focus on family.
“I can’t tell you the beauty of how much room that makes for other things,” Barrymore says of stepping away from the “5 a.m. to midnight” world of acting to be the “waker-up” and breakfast maker for her kids, among other things.
“It makes room for me to be the kind of parent I want to be,” she says. “I’ve done this (acting) for 40 years. There’s no way I would trade it for time with my kids.”
But she does occasionally say yes, even if, as with Miss You Already, the timing isn’t ideal.
“That’s why I was so angry when ( Miss You Already) came my way,” Barrymore says, not sounding angry at all. “I had just had my second daughter, Frankie, and I was like, ‘I can’t even read this. How am I going to do this?’ ”
Making a film that was “such a love story for women and all being done by women, I got really drawn into what that would be,” Barrymore said. “And maybe my girls, when they’re older, can watch this and the whole womanly aspect of it, (which) felt really safe and appropriate for where I was at that moment in my life.”
Barrymore, who also has a wine label, blogged as editor-at-large for lifestyle site Refinery29 to promote her beauty line and to give her a chance to start writing. So is she becoming a brand? “It’s hard for me to see myself objectively that way but as long as that brand is not a ‘pretend to be perfect I can show you how to do this so well’ . . . that’s where I feel some lifestyle stuff gets lost on me. I’m birdbrained about things,” laughs Barrymore.
“I am not ever going to pose myself as one of those people who’s like, ‘have it all together like this,’ ” she added. “I struggle to have it together.”
So if she’s not the Gen X Martha Stewart, perhaps she’s the anti-Stewart? The idea makes Barrymore laugh.
“I will not be able to show you how to make a birdhouse out of anything,” she says.
“I am the bird in the house flying around with my feathers, moulting like crazy.” Miss You Already
(out of 4) Starring Drew Barrymore, Toni Collette and Dominic Cooper. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. 112 minutes. Opening in wide release Nov. 6. STC
LINDA BARNARD
MOVIE WRITER
It starts out in a Beaches vein, with Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette as London-dwelling besties-from-girlhood, now both married, circling 40 and dealing with disappointments and crises. But thanks to the creativity of director Catherine Hardwicke ( Twilight, Thirteen) and a rock-solid performance from Collette as a former (not completely reformed) wild child facing cancer, Miss You Already gets to interesting places.
Barrymore is adorable as sunny Jess, whose infertility woes evaporate just as pal Millie’s (Collette) life begins to spiral. R.E.M. replaces Bette Midler’s anthem, but the tears will flow just the same.