Drew Barrymore opens up about 'numbing her pain' after divorce

Actor-producer Drew Barrymore, host of a namesake daytime talk-show hit, is speaking in more detail than previously about the personal cost of her 2016 divorce from third husband Will Kopelman.

"There was no scandal. Nothing went wrong, which is cleaner, but makes it harder and more confusing because there isn't The Thing to point to," Barrymore, 47, a two-time Daytime Emmy Award nominee for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host, says in the new issue of People magazine. "We tried so hard to make it work. [A friend] said to me, 'Divorce is the death of a dream.' That's exactly what it feels like, something so final you can't get it back."

For the sake of their daughters Olive, now 10, and Frankie, 8, Barrymore resolved that she and art consultant and Chanel scion Kopelman would remain a family. "I was determined to make it work because we all loved each other so much," she said.

To help facilitate this, Barrymore — whose lineage includes famed actors Lionel Barrymore, John Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore — moved from California to New York, where Kopelman's family lived. But her first winter there "just took me down," she said. "There are times where you can look at someone you think is a strong person and see them so broken and go, 'How the [expletive] did they get there?' And I was that person. I broke."

And though having recovered from alcohol addiction many years earlier, she succumbed again for a time.

"It was just trying to numb the pain and feel good — and alcohol totally did that for me," she told the magazine. "The drinking thing for me was a constant, like, 'You cannot change. You are weak and incapable of doing what's best for you. You keep thinking you will master this thing, and it's getting the better of you.' "

Barrymore, who has remained unmarried, previously was briefly married at 19 to Los Angeles bar owner Jeremy Thomas, and later briefly to comedian Tom Green. She later had a roughly five-year relationship through 2007 with Fabrizio Moretti, drummer for the band The Strokes.

A star of films including "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982), "The Amy Fisher Story" (1993), "Scream" (1996), "The Wedding Singer" (1998) and two "Charlie's Angels" movies (2000, 2003), and of the 2017-19 horror-comedy series "Santa Clarita Diet," Barrymore married Kopelman in June 2012. She filed for divorce in June 2016 and it quickly was finalized that August.

The current family dynamic suits her, she assures. Kopelman married Alexandra Michler, a Vogue fashion director, in 2021; Barrymore calls her "my favorite person. I love her. I love us all being together. These kids have an example of one of the parents moving on and rebuilding another life for themselves. I'm like, 'Oh, I don't have to do that now? Perfect.' "