In her 18 years of acting, Drew Barrymore has played
a manic-depressive (“Mad Love“), a teenage Lolita (“Poison Ivy“) and a pregnant
murderess (“Boys on the Side“). For her latest role as Julia in “The Wedding Singer,”
she shows a new, simpler side of herself.
“When it came to Julia, I just wanted her to be the girlfriend the guy would want to be with,” she said. “I don’t mean the guy, I mean men in general, a girl who was not a nag, a girl who was a simple pleasure to be around and really wanted to have fun, instead of like, you know, bitching about something, she’d be like ‘Let’s go do something.’ Just an all-around cheerful person. I thought the balance of those two people would make it sweetly obvious that they would have a good time in life together, and should be together.”
Her blond hair in a tousled flip, Barrymore‘s ensemble of a lavendar peasant blouse and black miniskirt further completes her wholesome turnaround from the wild child of a few years back. The daughter of actor John Barrymore, she grew up on-screen in “Altered States” and “E.T.” The pressures of early stardom drove her to drugs and alcohol by the tender age of 12, and her mother committed her to an institution for rehab. At the age of 14, she sued her parents for legal emancipation as an adult .
“Obviously, being institutionalized by my mother will always make me appreciate every little thing I see for the rest of my life,” she said. “Like I will look at that little recorder, and go ‘Isn’t it beautiful how technology has come such a long way?’ You just appreciate every little thing, like those curtains are so nice. There’s a window out there I could walk out freely on if I wanted to. How much you have to appreciate every little thing in life, how much that makes every day so very, very special.”
Now 22, Barrymore credits a stable relationship with actor Luke Wilson (“Bottle Rocket“) for keeping her sane. The couple met on the set of “Independence” and have been dating for a year and a half, but Barrymore skirts the issue of marriage. In 1994, she and pub owner Jeremy Thomas married, although their union dissolved after a brief two months.
“Marriage is strange. Everybody makes jokes, ‘You’ll only get married once or twice in your life.’ It’s funny, but you also go the opposite extreme when something goes to a certain level,” she said. “I think traditionalism, a romantic courtship, and just sort of being together, whether you’re married or not, and if you have a good working relationship that you have a good time in but you also work at, but you have fun, that’s the most important part. And marriage sort of becomes secondary to that, whether you are or not, it’s like about what your time is like together, and how do you spend your lives together. Because weddings can be just about one day of your life, and one day out of hundreds and thousands is so different than the relationship. Weddings are one thing, and marriage is another.”
In “The Wedding Singer,” Barrymore plays a good-natured waitress engaged to an obnoxious junk bonds trader. She begins to question her engagement when she meets wedding singer Adam Sandler. Stood up at the altar for his own wedding, Sandler agrees to help Barrymore plan her nuptials. She finds the icing on the cake when they begin to fall in love. Despite her failed marriage and troubled past, Barrymore said she remains an old-fashioned romantic at heart.
“The most romantic thing anybody’s ever done for me, well, what my boyfriend does for me every day, by just being nice and funny, that to me is romantic,” she said. “I’m absolutely quixotic, it’s pathetic. I love romance, I’m a sucker for it. I’m a doer, and I just love love so much. I’m crazy for it, I’m nutty for it. If I can even break the silence to say something nice, I will. I’ll take that risk.”
