Drew Barrymore names the greatest role she ever played: “That’s who I want to be”
Coming from one of Hollywood’s longest-reigning families with relatives in everything from Grand Hotel to It’s A Wonderful Life, it’s no surprise that Drew Barrymore would become a star, too.
After landing an unforgettable role in Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extraterrestrial when she was just seven years old, it didn’t take long for a young Barrymore to get sucked into the chaos of Hollywood, invited to decadent parties and club nights at Studio 54, where she consumed drugs and alcohol from as young as eight. By the age of 12, she’d done cocaine, and over the coming years, she’d be in and out of rehab.
Still, Barrymore kept acting, even if many of the roles she landed as a teenager were over-sexualised, like Far from Home from Poison Ivy. She was failed by those around her, the protection of her childhood nowhere to be seen. Before she was of legal age, she was posing nude for magazines and even wound up engaged, appearing in everything from Guncrazy, Bad Girls, Wayne’s World 2, Batman Forever, and Scream in the meantime.
Eventually, she reached a moment in her career where things started to look up. Entering her mid-20s, she found a newfound sense of adulthood – she wanted to be taken seriously. It was in 1998, then, that she took on a role that would prove to be her favourite, in spite of the more iconic performances she has given before then – and since.
Ever After, directed by Andy Tennant, is a charming retelling of the Cinderella story, refusing to Disney-fy this tale of defiance that is so often told without emphasis on the princess’s personal strength and independence, conducting a version of the tale that presents a different version of Cinderella, known as Danielle de Barbarac, who works tediously for her stepmother as a servant during the French Renaissance.
She is intelligent and self-sufficient, well-read and tough, and it’s this interpretation of Cinderella which challenges audience perception, which attracted Barrymore to the part, as she told Good Housekeeping, “I was trying to reinvent myself and come out of a tumultuous period,” wanting to “re-start her career… and be a young woman.”
Barrymore had long been seen as a Hollywood wild child – quite literally – with rehab stints and Playboy spreads presenting an image of the actor as unstable, impulsive, untameable, yet she just wanted to prove herself.
“I had been a kid and an awkward teenager as we all are, and I was at that place in my life where I was truly asking, What have I learned? What do I think? Who am I going to be? And then I came across this story that said, ‘The Grimm brothers had it all wrong, that Cinderella rescued herself.’ And I thought, ‘Rescue yourself? That’s who I want to be, that’s who I need to be in this life.’”
Inspired by the real Cinderella, Barrymore became her, earning acclaim for her performance and subsequently embarking on a career she would come to be proud of.
