Why Drew Barrymore Is Now Embracing Her Young Daughters Being 'Total Performers'
When you have the talent, you have the talent — and if anyone knows about that, it’s Drew Barrymore.
The actress, entrepreneur and mother of two, 44, recently sat down for a talk with the Today show, where she dished on her new Flower Kids collection and what made her come around to embracing the fact that her daughters Frankie, 5, and Olive, 7 next month, might have an entertainment career in their own futures.
“When I first had my kids, I think I was so obsessed with doing everything differently with them, I almost thought that acting was some calling from the devil,” said Barrymore, who first lit up movie screens as a young girl in films from the 1980s like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Firestarter.
“I was thinking, ‘My daughters will never be actors! God, no!’ ” she continues. “And then I’m, like, wait, it’s a great family trade. I’m a Barrymore. My family has been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years, and multiple generations.”
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What has “scared” Barrymore about the idea of Frankie and Olive going into acting is her own “unorthodox childhood” — something she didn’t want for her kids, whom she shares with ex-husband Will Kopelman.
“[What] I really wanted for them was something very normal and traditional and safe,” says the Santa Clarita Diet alum. “I feel like I’ve accomplished that or I continue to sort of have that be my intention every day.”
But the actress can’t change the fact that her daughters are naturally “total performers,” admitting, “maybe they do have that Barrymore blood in there.”
“Olive knows that I would prefer she wait until she’s 18, and then it’s really her life and her decision,” she says. “I think there’s a way to give them a normal childhood that’s totally protected, and yet feed their love of how much they love to express themselves. And when they were first born, I just didn’t know how to rationalize it. Now, I do.”
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Barrymore says that it’s “a no-brainer” to teach her girls about body positivity, since she has “never fallen prey to the pressures of Hollywood” (“I’m, like, please. I don’t know why it seems so silly to me but it always has”). But there is one thing that makes that lesson a little more difficult nowadays: social media.
“The thing I hate about social media is that I wish I could bring my daughters up in a world where it didn’t exist,” she says. “The good news is I was on the cover of the National Enquirer at, like, 7 years old, so I’m like, all right, that’s basically social-media training ground. … I get it. I was raised in a life where everything was out there.”
“I am built to handle these girls and the pressures they’re going to face, because I had to navigate them, too,” Barrymore adds. “And the thing I love about social media is that we can communicate in a different way. To all people on social media, do not read the negative comments. You can’t find validation in social media.”
The one thing she wants to teach her kids to do while working at separating themselves from the pressures of societal expectations? “To look in the mirror and find the good and stop picking at the bad,” Barrymore says.
