Cameron Diaz has opened up emotionally about Drew Barrymore’s battle with alcohol and her journey to sobriety in a new interview.
Diaz, 50, who has been best friends with Barrymore, 48, since the 1990s, said watching her friend go into depression and drinking after her 2016 divorce from Will Kopelman was “hard to watch”.
Friends then staged a “quasi-intervention” to help the actress battle her demons, which were also triggered when she moved from her “constant” Los Angeles to New York.
Speaking to the LA Times in a profile for Barrymore, The Mask actress said: ‘But I knew if we all stuck with her and gave her the support she needed, she would find her way.
‘I have absolute confidence in her. You can’t even fathom how hard it was to be her as a kid, and then she shot the other end with the ability to save herself.
The Charlie’s Angels star shared that she was in such a destructive spiral that her therapist, Barry Michels, abandoned her.
“He just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” she revealed. “It was really because of my drinking. I said, “I get it. I’ve never respected you so much. See, I’m not improving. And I hope one day I can earn your trust back.”
The ET star, who shares daughters Olive, 10, and Frankie, eight, with her ex, started drinking heavily when her marriage broke down.
The 50 First Dates actress was married to Kopelman from 2012 to 2016.
She spent a few years after the divorce drinking to numb the pain. When she started her talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show, in 2019, she had an epiphany.
“I think the opportunity for a show like this really struck me,” she said. ‘I was like, ‘I can’t handle this unless I’m in a really clear place.’
The Santa Clarita Diet alum put the bottle down after shooting her talk show pilot. And two years after her therapist left her, she reconnected with him and they started working together again.
She realized the only person she wasn’t supporting was herself.
‘You seem to be so inspired by everyone, but you treat each other like s—. When are you going to be self-sufficient, she said.
Drew had been down this path before. At 13, she entered rehab for drug and alcohol addiction.
At 14, she attempted suicide and returned to rehab.
When a tabloid exposed her, she decided to write her story in the memoir Little Girl Lost in 1990.
“Day after day, Drew Barrymore succeeds,” read the cover of the book. “She knows other kids can do it too.”
Drew emancipated from her parents at 15 and moved into her own apartment in West Hollywood.
In December, Barrymore revealed that giving up alcohol had allowed her “finally to be free from the torture of guilt” as she opened up about her sobriety.
The star opened up about her sobriety in an essay published in Take Care of Yourself, the December addition to her monthly magazine titled Drew.
The award-winning actress wrote about her detachment from alcohol, as she called it “one of the most liberating things in my life journey”.
Writing in his monthly magazine, Drew encouraged readers to step up, saying, “One of the bravest things you can do is slay those dragons and finally change an awful cycle you’ve found yourself in. stuck. For me, it was to stop drinking.
Drew further admitted that giving up alcohol allowed him to “finally free himself from the torture of guilt and dysfunction”.
In a message to readers, she continued, “Take a moment, breathe and hold on tight. We are all doing our best here. And that in itself is something to celebrate.
The veteran actress who rose to fame at the age of 6 for her performance as Gertie in the 1982 film ET the Extra-Terrestrial, struggled with both alcohol and drug addiction in her youth .
In 1989, Barrymore, then 14, told People magazine how she drank her first drink at age nine, smoked pot at age 10 and started using cocaine at age 12. By age 13, she had gone through drug treatment twice.
She was briefly blacklisted from Hollywood when she was 12 years old.
Not one to shy away from her past addictions, Drew told CBS This Morning in December 2021 that “alcohol doesn’t serve her.”