Why Drew Barrymore isn't acting: 'I don't want to be on a film set right now'

Drew Barrymore stopped acting so much to raise her kids. (Photo: Mike Pont/Getty Images)
Drew Barrymore stopped acting so much to raise her kids. (Photo: Mike Pont/Getty Images)

Drew Barrymore seems to be everywhere these days, with TV's The Drew Barrymore Show and her cruelty-free makeup line, Flower Beauty, but she's been largely absent from new movies and TV shows.

She told Andy Cohen, when he asked her Wednesday on SiriusXM's Radio Andy, that she isn't really thinking of returning. At least, not yet.

"If I'm being honest, the answer is no, I don't want to be on a film set right now, but that could change when my kids are older," Barrymore said. "I stopped doing these when my kids were born, because I've done it since I was in diapers, at 11 months old is when I started. And it was a no brainer to me to put making movies on a back burner, so that I could be present and raise my kids myself. I didn't want to be on a film set asking the nanny how the kids were. I was like, that is not my journey. And so when you step away from it, it's a lot less scary."

Barrymore has two daughters — 8-year-old Olive and Frankie, who turns 7 next month — that she shares with ex-husband Will Kopelman.

Her last projects were the 2020 comedy movie The Stand-In and, before that, the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet, in which she played a flesh-eating zombie living in suburbia. Barrymore said the project, which spanned three seasons between 2017 and 2019, was perfectly timed for her.

"That was, I have to say I was so knee deep into mothering my kids. I was like, I don't know who I am anymore. I think I went way too far the opposite direction," Barrymore said. "And if I can't remember that I'm an individual with a skill set, I might die. So then I got to play this woman who gets to eat people and it was exactly how I felt. And it was just perfect, and it was comedy and it was delicious and it was fun and it was irreverent, and I couldn't have loved it more. And it really saved me. I had gained a lot of weight. I had lost my way. I was going through a really difficult divorce in that it just was the worst thing and everything I didn't want to happen."

Working on the show reminded her she was more than a struggling mom.

"That show was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me," Barrymore said. "So it reminded me to not lose the baby with the bath water in that I don't want to be filming all the time because I want to raise my kids. It's like, you are this person, don't ditch who you are for your kids. I think that's a recipe for disaster and parenting."

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