The mystery of The Drew Barrymore show, a basic celebrity-chat format, is not how it got to be so popular, with every episode a soaraway success, but how much she manages to get out of people. Even if you are not interested in celebrities, there is a radical naivety to Barrymore – watch her enjoying the rain, for its very distillation – that is joyful, unreflective and fun to watch, like a dog in a hat.
If you are interested in celebrities, these will be the most interesting interviews you’ve ever watched, with deeply personal confidences, from stars in their prime. This just isn’t how things work; when you have hinterland, whether that’s an alcohol problem or an A1 anecdote, you save it for when you’re on the skids, trying for a Vanity Fair cover or writing a memoir. You don’t throw it away on five minutes of TV. So how does she do it?
Jordan Fisher
Well, first and foremost, it’s not replicable: you can call it a masterclass, but not in the sense that anyone else could learn it. Barrymore is as physically expressive as Rudolf Nureyev cut with a circus performer, pure sincerity writ larger than life. But it starts with the fact that she is incredibly tactile.
The Broadway performer Jordan Fisher revealed recently that he had struggled with an eating disorder all his life, which he’d only had diagnosed while he was expecting his first child. If you watch just that clip, it is impossible to fathom how Barrymore got that out of him. Go back to a couple of minutes before, however. He says something very broad but heartfelt about show business, how “it’s hard”, in that industry, “to come by humans, like real people, that love other humans.” Immediately, she is kneeling before him, hugging him. How are you not going to tell this woman everything?
Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter
Lynskey, from Yellowjackets, and Ritter, from Accused, are everyone’s favourite couple, or rather #relationshipgoals, and they do make a charming, self-deprecating double-act, with Lynskey running through all the times Ritter met her and failed to remember her, Ritter looking bashful. But he then breaks from cute to real, as he describes his struggles with alcoholism and how he didn’t think he deserved Lynskey until he was sober.
It is a high-trust moment, since there are so many plausible chatshow-host responses that would have been wrong. If Barrymore had been too blithe, it would have made the moment awkward; too serious, and the couple would have come across as a pity case. But they know she’ll get it right because Barrymore has been on such a well-known journey of her own with addiction (she was in rehab by the age of 13). What she says is pitch perfect, not dramatic, just open.
She hasn’t had a relationship since she gave up drinking almost four years ago, and “I’m really looking forward to one day not having that bad girl narrative,” she says, “the instability, the ‘I’m not someone who’s right to be with anyone for their sake’.” While not for a second suggesting that anyone has taken LSD before the interview, it is like watching an interview in which everyone has taken LSD.
Jane Fonda
This interview went viral mainly because of the revelation that, when they were making Monster-in-Law, Jane Fonda and Jennifer Lopez had to slap each other, and because JLo was wearing a great big diamond ring, she opened up a flesh wound on Fonda’s eyebrow and – here’s the kicker – never apologised [JLo refutes this].
Barrymore wasn’t fishing for that. She just has one of those “tell me more about so-and-so, no judgment, no come-back” faces; you don’t have to be her to have one of those, you just need to have gone to an all-girls’ school (which, by the way, she didn’t).
Dylan Mulvaney
In one of the most heartwarming clips of the oeuvre, comedian and transgender activist Mulvaney considers what has become a dispiritingly pressing issue of the day, what to do about the crescendo of voices calling into question the right of trans people to exist. “I think the greatest weapon that I can contribute is trans joy… let everybody in to see that I’m not a monster,” Mulvaney says. It wasn’t a difficult statement to elicit, this isn’t about interview technique: rather, agenda. Barrymore, in her choice of guest, warmth of manner, simplicity of approach, made the space for that to be said, because she wanted to amplify it.
Brooke Shields
Last week’s interview with Brooke Shields about #MeToo was as nuanced a conversation imaginable about sexual exploitation within the industry: not is it bad?; nor how to stamp it out? (those had to happen too, of course) – but rather, why was it so difficult to say any of this, before the floodgates opened? Barrymore leans in so that she’s practically sitting on her knee as Shields says: “You victim shame yourself. We were so young. When it was called out to me as such, I was like, ‘No. Not going there. That did not happen’.”
I don’t think it was strategic, because as a strategy, it is so incredibly high-risk: but there is a quavering instability to Shields’s voice that makes Barrymore almost want to rescue her, like a backup chorus. “That’s exactly how I felt, I felt like I couldn’t speak to the movement. I felt like I experienced too many things that were so grey and so awkward.” It was very poignant. It seemed to say more about solidarity than it did about sex. It sealed the truism, that if there’s anything you don’t want to say, don’t try to not say it to Drew Barrymore.
