Ditzy, unfiltered: why Drew Barrymore is Hollywood’s great survivor

An office-style desk was once the key prop on a television chatshow â€" a standard piece of kit beloved of Johnny Carson and David Letterman, not to mention Britain’s Jonathan Ross. Then the comfy sofa took over and guests began to scooch along, making room for each other. Now, though, under the auspices of Drew Barrymore, host of a daytime show on CBS, it’s the lowly rug that is taking centre stage.

Barrymore, who is still best known internationally for her childhood role as the little girl in ET, likes to interact with her guests on a fluffy rug in the middle of her set in New York’s Broadcast Center. She has prostrated herself upon it more than once in front of her studio audience and prefers it to the show’s pink satin armchairs.

Last week, however, the 49-year-old star found the unconventional informality of her style being debated across America. Barrymore had pulled off a coup and booked the vice president, Kamala Harris, as a guest, and was pretty happy about it. Backstage clips show her shrieking as she urges a game, slightly ambushed-looking Harris to recount the moment she heard she was elected to office, as if it was a juicy detail from a high school prom. More notably, Barrymore had picked up on Harris’s admission that her family nickname is Momala. Sliding up close to the veep on the couch and clasping her hands, the host begged her to be “Momala of the country”.

In the aftermath of this cloying interview, the US media personality Meghan McCain took Barrymore to task for being intimate with so distinguished a guest. “Not everything you do is a therapy session, and some of this stuff is just not appropriate,” McCain said on her podcast, suggesting someone ought to have a word. Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly also levelled her sights at the episode, expressing annoyance at how closely the pair were sitting. Most seriously, Barrymore has been accused by some of being complicit with the “nannyfication” of black women by projecting a stereotype on to Harris. Writing in the New York Times, Charles M Blow argued that black women still spend their lives fighting a society “insistent on forcing them to fit broad generalisa tions” including the role “of the mammy â€" the caretaker, the bosom in which all can rest, the apron on which we have a right to hang”.

Barrymore’s chatshow, which was launched during Covid, had already been roundly lampooned on Saturday Night Live, the popular sketch show which Barrymore herself has hosted six times (once as a child star of seven). A skit had comedian Chloe Fineman appear as Barrymore sporting a big blouse and a lispy Valley girl voice.

And last year Barrymore was the object of a less playful sort of derision when she was forced to retract a plan to air her chatshow in the middle of a Hollywood talent strike. The incident briefly made her a showbiz pariah, and the taint of strike breaker has yet to be quite dispelled no matter how many on-set love-ins she has staged.

Barrymore interviewing vice president Kamala Harris on 29 April. Photograph: Planet Photos

From the first episode, Barrymore has made a point of demonstratively bonding with guests. Last spring the show made headlines when she shared experiences of being trolled online and empathised with her guest, the trans actor Dylan Mulvaney, whose TikTok series Days of Girlhood has more than 10 million followers. The tap is always set to gush, as in January this year, when Barrymore was reunited on air with actor Dermot Mulroney, her co-star in Bad Girls. She also regularly “goes there” when it comes to her personal life, recently telling viewers about how she shares her parenting concerns with best pal Cameron Diaz and confessing that she once accidentally left a list of the people she had slept with at the home of actor Danny DeVito. “He came on the show and I was like: ‘I left my sex list at your house’,” Barrymore said. A month ago the host was back in the news as social media followers applauded the humble normality of her small New York kitchen, with its basic hob. Her other home in the Hamptons is equipped on a grander scale, however.

Fans salute Barrymore as a daytime host for our times. Viewers, after all, have been through a lot recently, and it isn’t over yet. Pestilence, #MeToo, war, plague, Donald Trump series 1 and global heating are all proving quite a ride. And the Marvel universe franchise is not solace for everyone. So Barrymore’s warmth, with tears just a heartbeat away, coupled with her ability to share confidences, makes her uniquely suited to an era when everybody is sensitive and gossip drives the media.

What’s more, Barrymore is entertainment royalty. Not only is she the goddaughter of Sophia Loren and godmother to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s child, but she was also born into two acting dynasties that date back two centuries: the Barrymores and the Drews. Her grandfather, John Barrymore, and his siblings Lionel and Ethel, were leading lights of the stage and screen. Ethel, cutting a figure rather like Ellen Terry in England, was hailed “the first lady of the American theatre”, while John, equally famous, starred opposite Greta Garbo in the Oscar-winning 1932 early romcom Grand Hotel. So while her father, John Drew Barrymore, was chiefly a television star, her ancestry is embedded in the Broadway world of “legitimate theatre”.

In Hollywood, according to film writer Jeremy Kay, she is widely regarded as well-meaning but prone to misjudgments due, perhaps, to her “outsized empathy”. Her apparent ditziness, he argues, should also be seen in the light of her seriously troubled youth. “She’s a survivor,” said Kay.

Starring in ET (1982) at age seven had a big impact on Barrymore’s life. Photograph: Allstar

Born in Culver City, California, Barrymore was raised in West Hollywood and then Sherman Oaks by her mother, Jaid, an aspiring actor. In her 2015 memoir, Wildflower, Barrymore wrote of the impact of stardom after her role in ET. Some inveterate partying led to a period in rehab, a suicide attempt and time in a mental health institute. A legal petition for emancipation allowed her to move into her own apartment at 15. Perhaps the clearest recent sign of the strain of her youth came in an interview at singer Shania Twain’s home for he r show last year. The women discussed being breadwinners for their families in childhood, with Barrymore saying she’d always felt responsible for others.

Her films, including Never Been Kissed, Scream and Charlie’s Angels, were part of a wave of teen-oriented entertainment that, as the Observer described it in 1999, “were rolling off the Hollywood production line at a speed not witnessed for 50 years”. Cinemagoers were treated to an invasion of freckly faces and sassy dialogue, and Barrymore led the charge.

A string of short-lived relationships and marriages punctuated the actor’s 20s, with partners including Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson and the MTV host Tom Green, her co-star in Charlie’s Angels. In a 2003 interview Barrymore declared ­herself bisexual. By 2012 she was ­married to the art consultant Will Kopelman, the father of her two daughters. They divorced in 2016.

With Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu in Charlie's Angels (2000). Photograph: Darren Michaels/AP

Crucial to the past ­decade in Barrymore’s life has been her ­decision to turn her back on drink and drugs. She has ­spoken candidly and bravely about wanting to break the genetic “chain” of addiction that dogged her family, to set a better example for her daughters.

Like those pin-up stars of the turn of the last century, Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts, Barrymore has managed to step away from acting for a prolonged period and build an altered, adult identity.

She found recovering from the shock of being the butt of the SNL sketch liberating: “It set me free and stopped me from beating up on myself as much. It opened up doors inside me that went: ‘It’s OK for you to be silly. Maybe you won’t get fired’.”

US chatshows have different DNA from their British cousins. There is none of the reserved, barbed style favoured here. The big stars are either full of sophisticated late-night sarcasm or are upbeat cheerleaders, such as Oprah Winfrey.

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Peter Kessler, a former television producer, worked on Channel 4’s Clive Anderson Talks Back, as well as making Here’s Johnny with Johnny Vaughan and producing the first series of Graham Norton’s show for the channel. (He also made the beloved chat-show spoof Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton Show for the BBC.) As a result, he knows what’s under the bonnet of a talkshow. The personality of the host, he says, is the motor.

“Caroline idolised people like Michael Parkinson and Russell Harty, and saw herself as trying in a small way to follow in their footsteps,” Kessler said this weekend, remembering that, although Norton’s first outings were designed to be comic, “it quickly became clear that Graham just loved meeting people and getting them to talk about their lives. Now, 25 years later, Graham is the purest chat-show host we have without ever losing his comic roots.”

Kessler recalls feedback offered by a Channel 4 executive after the Norton pilot episode, which underlines the point: “‘Could you make him less gay?’ I said that would not be possible, and that Graham was, and would continue to be, exactly as gay as he is.”

It is an indication that, whatever Barrymore is told, her best plan is to be more of her authentic, emoting self rather than less.