Actress-producer Drew Barrymore talked obliquely about the end of her marriage in her first interview since confirming on Saturday she and her third husband are divorcing.
“I had a really hard time a couple of months ago and kind of knew life was heading in a new direction,” Barrymore, 40, told the women’s website PopSugar.com Monday, referring to issues with art consultant and Chanel scion Will Kopelman. The two married on June 2, 2012, and have two daughters: Olive, 3, and Frankie, who turns 2 this month.
“I called someone that I really trust, respect, and believe in, because he has always been the conductor of grace,” she told the site, not mentioning the man by name. “I said, ‘What’s your advice?’ And he said, ‘You put one foot in front of the other.’ I hung up the phone and I thought, ‘That is why I call this person.’ It’s not only succinct, but it’s almost physically productive and life-choice productive. It’s just great advice. It’s a kind of way in which to live, and I want to be like him. I want to be like that. I want to put one foot in front of the other.”
Barrymore — who produced this year’s “How to Be Single” and as an actress most recently starred opposite Toni Collete, in 2015’s “Miss You Already” — added that, “The only thing I care about, my life’s mission and the only thing that matters as of now, is that my daughters know what our lives were like, how we lived, and how much I love them. For them to know that they were not just loved, but, like, ridiculously, utterly, life-alteringly loved.”
This was Barrymore’s third marriage. In March 1994, when she was 19, she married 31-year-old Los Angeles bar owner Jeremy Thomas, filing for divorce fewer than two months later. Barrymore wed comedian Tom Green in July 2001 after a year’s engagement; he filed for divorce in December that year. Barrymore then had a five-year relationship with Fabrizio Moretti, drummer for the band The Strokes, from 2002 to 2007.
Confirming a report from a day earlier, Kopelman and Barrymore told People magazine in a statement Saturday that, “Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family. Divorce might make one feel like a failure, but eventually you start to find grace in the idea that life goes on. Our children are our universe, and we look forward to living the rest of our lives with them as the first priority.”
