As Drew Barrymore prepares to launch her very own talk show, she’s reflecting on some of her own headline-making appearances as a guest on the late-night circuit — like the 1995 moment when she hopped on David Letterman’s desk and lifted her top in honor of his birthday.
“I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned in a very long life in front of people is there is a line,” Barrymore now says of the notorious clip, according to a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “There is TMI. And I kind of know what that line is, and it’s a feeling.”
Now a 45-year-old mother of two who’s launched her own production company in addition to a beauty line and other businesses, Barrymore is a far cry from the former child star and teen tabloid favorite who went to rehab at age 13. A scion of the famed acting dynasty the Barrymores, the E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial actress successfully petitioned to be emancipated from her parents as a teen, and documented her heavy partying and alcohol and drug use in the 1991 autobiography Little Girl Lost.
“I see someone who knew that I probably was all I had,” she says of pushing for emancipation. “So, it was like, you figure it out or, you know, you’re gonna go the way of the cliché, as they say.”
Of those tumultuous days, Barrymore says “I pushed the limits a lot, many different times in my life. And I’m very lucky, I know that. I tested, I pushed, probably too far many a time.”
But she looks for silver linings out of those experiences, saying, “I at least tried to meet that blessing with having learned something.”
Drew Barrymore opened up about her tumultuous youth in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning. (Photo: Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic)
Her own rocky childhood has also had an impact on how she parents her two daughters, 7-year-old Olive and 6-year-old Frankie; their father is ex-husband Will Kopelman, from whom she split in 2016.
“I wanna be all about, you know, the pillars of appropriateness and decorum,” Barrymore says. “And I don’t lie to my kids. I’m, like, I had to find my way here. So, yeah, I’ve lived a lot of different lives, and this is what’s important to me now. But, my kids have inspired me to be the best person I have ever been in my life, and I thank them every single day for that.”
With just one day to go before she embarks on a new career in daytime TV — during a pandemic, no less — the budding talk show host says she’s making the most of the second chances she’s received.
“I’ve also had my career go away at, like, 13,” she notes. “I mean, if that doesn’t give you some perspective and gratitude for every job you get, nothing will. I’m like, I am working!! This is amazing!!“
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