Drew Barrymore is looking back at her Playboy cover nearly 30 years later, but now with a different pair of eyes since becoming a mother to two daughters.
The actress opened up in a lengthy Instagram post on Friday, titled “PHONE HOME” (referencing her 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), saying she wanted to “put myself out there as a parent” in a “very vulnerable way.”
This included Barrymore recalling her childhood in Hollywood and growing up in an “unorthodox” way, with her “experience of being so out there in the world and going to adult environments and working” as a child. The actress also recounted posing for the January 1995 issue of Playboy, right before her 20th birthday.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
Barrymore continued, “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. I never knew there would be an internet. I didn’t know so many things.”
Now, as a parent, the Drew Barrymore Show host is determined to “protect them [her kids] the way I wanted to be protected.” She “never thought in my wildest dreams that kids would be in my boat of too much excess and access” with modern-day technology and social media, which is one reason she isn’t ready for her daughters, Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, to have smartphones yet.
She explained that she “was emancipated at 14 years old and moved into my first apartment,” which made her feel like she “started my life over on my own terms.”
“But in a consistent message to myself, I found that there was no one to take care of me,” Barrymore continued. “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.”
But thanks to the kindness people have shown her throughout her life since she “was lucky enough to start engaging with people” from a young age, she now wants “to give that goodness right back in reciprocity.” And the Charlie’s Angels star wants to do that by helping to “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.”
“I messed up in public when I was 13, and people were shocked,” Barrymore recalled of her own traumatic childhood experience. “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.”
Instead, the 50 First Dates star said she “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. We make mistakes. And people have been so kind to me. Forgiven me. And cheered me on as I grew up.”
“So yeah, it is also my karma and life’s work to cheer people on right back!” Barrymore added. “We all fall and rise. Over and over. Life’s roller coaster. And what a beautiful ride it is. But here on earth is a timed-out journey. We must make the best of it and take care of each other in the process.”
