Drew Barrymore on Her Famously Wild Childhood: 'I Loved All of It'

Drew Barrymore doesn’t regret anything she did in her childhood in Hollywood.

The actress opened up about how she felt about her past during a conversation with Ball Maher on the Club Random podcast. After he brought up her childhood drug use around the 4:55 mark, Barrymore admitted that she doesn’t feel bad about it.

“I don’t regret a thing though,” said Barrymore. “I loved all of it. It’s hilarious being a mom because you’re like, ‘Oh my God, you can’t do that.'”

Barrymore has been very open about what she went through at a young age — enough so that she wrote a memoir about her childhood called Little Girl Lost that was published in 1990.

After getting her breakthrough role as Gertie in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial when she was seven years old, Barrymore began drinking and developed a drug problem by the time she was 12 years old.

In 2018, the actress got candid about her drug abuse during an interview on Norm Macdonald Has a Show. “You know what’s exciting? I got my shit over with at, like, 14,” Barrymore said. “Like, midlife crisis, institutionalized, blacklisted, no family. Got it done. And then got into the cycle of being my own parent.”

In 2021, Barrymore spoke about overcoming her past issues on CBS Mornings.

“Maybe people think, like, I figured out so many problems when I was young, because it was so hard then,” she said. “We continue to confront things with each decade of our life that almost surpasses what we thought we had seen. I’m interested in that conversation – we don’t fix it, move on and it never breaks again. We are on that roller coaster.”