After more than 40 years of working in Hollywood, Drew Barrymore is bound to have some regrets.
In a “very vulnerable” message posted to Instagram on Friday, the actress and talk show host reflected on her years in the spotlight, how her tumultuous childhood has inspired her parenting today, and the remorse she still feels over her 1995 “Playboy” photo shoot.
“I was around plenty of hedonistic scenarios at parties and even in my own home where the viewing was of highly sensitive natures and caused me tremendous shame,” Barrymore wrote in the post titled, PHONE HOME. “We, as kids, are not meant to see these images. And, yes, I was even a big exhibitionist when I was young due to these environments I was in. I thought of it as art, and I still do not judge it.”
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Drew Barrymore regrets doing “Playboy” cover in 1995. (Getty Images)
“But when I did a chaste artistic moment in ‘Playboy’ in my early 20s, I thought it would be a magazine that was unlikely to resurface because it was paper,” Barrymore added. “I never knew there would be an internet. I didn’t know so many things.”
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As a mom to two pre-teen daughters (Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10), Barrymore said she’s focused on protecting her children “the way I wanted to be protected.”
Especially when it comes to the new world of social media.
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“I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me ‘no,’ I wanted so badly to rebel all the time, and it was because I had no guardrails. I had too much acces and excess, and eventually ‘no’ actually became a challenge.”
“I never thought in my wildest dreams that kids would be in my boat of too much excess and access,” she added.
Drew Barrymore (Getty Images/Kevin Mazur Archive/WireImage)
Barrymore went on to explain that she was emancipated at 14 years old, at which point she moved into her first apartment.
“I started my life over on my terms. But in a consistent message to myself, I found that there was no one to take care of me,” she wrote. “My own mother was lambasted for allowing me to get so out of control. I have so much empathy for her now, because I am a mother. And none of us is perfect.”
“I was on the cover of the ‘National Enquirer’ and every other magazine as a washed-up tragedy … I wanted to disappear from the planet and never show my face again.”
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“Now that I am a mother, I cannot believe I am in a world that I know correlates to my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon. Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much. Kids are supposed to be protected. Kids are supposed to hear NO.”
Drew Barrymore attends the 2023 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor presentation at The Kennedy Center on March 19, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
Barrymore further discussed the toxicity that can come from group texts.
“We must protect our children from being put in scenarios where they cannot always control the rhetoric of the multiple-party dynamics that get put on record on a cloud only to potentially haunt them one day,” she wrote.
“I messed up in public when I was 13, and people were shocked,” she added. “I was on the cover of the ‘National Enquirer’ and every other magazine as a washed-up tragedy. And I thought that would be my narrative forever. I wanted to disappear from the planet and never show my face again.”
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“But I put one foot in front of the other and put my life back on track, only to make more mistakes along the way, but that is life,” she continued. “We make mistakes. And people have been so kind to me. Forgiven me. And cheered me on as I grew up.”
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“So yeah, it is also my karma and life’s work to cheer people on right back!” Barrymore concluded. “We all fall and rise. Over and over. Life’s roller coaster. And what a beautiful ride it is.”
