LOS ANGELES — Drew Barrymore, who grew up in L.A., is a very reluctant New Yorker.
After moving to New York so her daughters, Olive and Frankie, could be closer to dad Will Kopelman’s family, the couple’s dynamic quickly shifted and they separated, then divorced in 2016. Even so, the actor-producer-host sold her Hollywood Hills home in 2018.
Now Barrymore has a place in Manhattan and another in the Hamptons, but it still doesn’t feel quite like home, she told The Times’ Amy Kaufman.
“If you don’t think I’m on Zillow every night researching ...,” Barrymore told her L.A.-based interviewer with a coy smile. “I’m sure I’ll be back there. This is just a chapter.”
She’s had other chapters in New York, but they didn’t seem as real as this one.
“I had been coming to New York since 1982. But I’ve always felt like it’s like plugging into a light socket,” Barrymore, 48, told Kaufman. “When I was a kid, I totally loved Times Square because it looked just like Hollywood Boulevard, and I grew up right off that. So I was like, all right, OK, I see the similarities.
“You know, many of them were taboo with the X-rated movie theaters, and, you know, the sort of more tawdry side of life. But that felt safe and familiar to me, because that was what was in my backyard of West Hollywood.”
But New York was just a “playground that I would stay at for periods of time,” she said, and she would “run back” to L.A. She never felt like New York was home.
Then it became her only home.
“I think it took selling my house in Los Angeles to realize like, this is all you have now. This is what you have,” Barrymore said. “And this is where you are. So you need to embrace it in a way you’ve never really been able to.”
Moving from the 8,000-square-foot home she had owned since 2002 wasn’t easy. Most of her friends were in L.A. The only “unit” she had in New York was her ex’s family. (She’s still good friends with Kopelman’s sister, Jill Kargman, even after the divorce.)
“I hysterically sobbed. I did not want to move here. I think also, like, the 90046 area code is my one constant. It’s where I grew up as a little baby. And it’s where I lived until I moved here and had to sell my house. It was so hard.”
Barrymore felt “really lost,” she said, and didn’t know what to do with her life.
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