Drew Barrymore, 47, was struggling through a “cripplingly difficult time” following her 2016 divorce from Will Kopelman, 44. The actress revealed this in an interview with “People” magazine. “After the family life I had planned for my children failed, it was a messy, painful, agonizing way to walk through the fire and come back to life.”
Above all, the first winter she spent in New York after the breakup pulled her down. “It just blew me away,” she says. “There are moments when you see someone you think is strong so broken that you’re like, ‘How the hell did he get there?'” And that person was her: “I was broken.”
In desperation, Drew Barrymore reached for the bottle. “I was just trying to numb the pain and feel good – and alcohol did that for me,” she said. The former child star (“E.T.”), who was introduced to drugs and alcohol at an early age, was seeing signs of a relapse. “The drinking thing was a constant for me, like, ‘You can’t change. You’re weak and unable to do what’s best for you,'” she confessed. “You keep thinking you can handle this thing and it just keeps getting worse with you.”
The actress went into therapy and got the alcohol under control. She then turned to developing her own talk show. “The Drew Barrymore Show” will air in 2020. The show was something to focus on and throw yourself into. “It gave me something to believe in.”
Drew Barrymore has been married three times. From 1994 to 1995 she was married to bar owner Jeremy Thomas. In 2001, the marriage to comedian Tom Green (51) followed – in 2002 this also broke up. The 47-year-old was married to Kopelman the longest before they went their separate ways in 2016. Barrymore has two children with him, Olive (10) and Frankie (8).
