Going the Distance clip: Clip from the romantic comedy Going the Distance, starring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long.
"I am just a big walking question mark with an open heart." / Kwaku Alston, Stockland Martel, for USA WEEKEND.
Art imitates life in Going the Distance, opening Sept. 3 / SOUL BROTHER, FILMMAGIC
Long-distance love: Drew's survival guide
On screen, Drew Barrymore's character navigates a long-distance relationship in the new movie Going the Distance. The casting hits close to home. Off screen, "all the relationships I have had are long-distance, because the people I've been with travel," the actress says. "I can tell you for sure: That's double trouble."
Among Barrymore's long-distance loves: Distance co-star Justin Long; actor Jamie Walters; Tom Green, the comedian and her former husband; and Fabrizio Moretti, drummer for The Strokes.
We asked Barrymore to give us her take on how to survive love at a distance:
DO write letters. "Letters are the most thoughtful things you can do. You can carry it in your purse or sleep with it under your pillow."
DON'T tweet. "I suppose e-mail is the most romantic [medium] of the technological world. I don't do Facebook. I have never tweeted in my life."
DO make a plan. "It is essential, so you have something to look forward to."
DON'T let the separation stress you out. "That can become exhausting, and that wears on the relationship, and then it starts not to work."
DO make each other laugh. "I don't care if you have to write a funny card or leave a funny message, but keep that laughter up.
"I may not have you physically, but if I am laughing about something you said, that is just as sexy. If someone makes you laugh, the chemistry just shoots through the roof."
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Drew Barrymore is on top. At 35, she is an award-winning actress and director, as beautiful as she has ever been, with yet another movie coming out next weekend. Relaxing on the comfortable sofa in the office of her Hollywood production company, she remains girlishly charming, exuding a warmth and vulnerability that give Barrymore her unlikely star power.
Successful, yes, but settled? Hardly.
“I am trying to figure out what the second half of my life is going to be - if I am lucky enough to have one,” she says. “What am I going to do? Am I going to have a baby? Who am I going to end up with?”
She laughs, as though she has revealed too much, and shifts her position.
“I am just a big walking question mark with an open heart,” says the famously emotional actress, her eyes welling up.
Here to talk about her new movie, Going the Distance, a romantic comedy co-starring her on-again off-again boyfriend Justin Long that opens Sept. 3, Barrymore is in an especially candid mood. She freely discusses her latest concerns, crutches and strained family relations, not to mention her travails with a series of her own long-distance boyfriends, including Long, 32.
“We are both really attracted to each other,” she says, and she denies rumors that she’s seeing someone else at the moment. “It’s the most honest chemistry I have ever had with anyone on a film.”
Barrymore’s power of positive thinking is part of her substantial charm - and what seems to have sustained her through troubles past. A star since age 7, when she stole the world’s heart as Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Barrymore has ricocheted from top to bottom (an alcoholic before she hit 13) and back (she won a Golden Globe this year for her role in the HBO movie Grey Gardens), her every move - and misstep - documented in a dizzying blur of headlines.
Today, she says, her personal life is still evolving.
Example: “My relationship with my mother is something I always strived to make as good as possible,” she says reflectively. “We just hit our bumps along the way. It’s not an easy relationship. I’d say it is still a work in progress.”
So is Barrymore, who is just now coming to terms with her success. Addiction problems sent her “to some pretty tough facilities,” she says. “I didn’t work for two years. I couldn’t get hired.
“Turns out that people shutting the door in my face was a blessing, because it proved that you could not do certain things and get away with them.”
She offers some perspective for young celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan who seem to draw trouble.
“I empathize with what some of them have been going through,” she says. But, she believes, advice probably won’t help. When she was struggling, “I didn’t want to be patronized by anyone. I was like ‘Please, just go away. I don’t want to hear it. Don’t patronize me. Don’t think you can understand me. Just blank off!’”
We talk about the past few months when, worn out from five years of “proving myself,” she felt a deep sense of confidence after winning critical acclaim for Grey Gardens and for Whip It, her directorial debut, and was able to step back from Hollywood. Others might have rushed into more work, but Barrymore took to her bed and read such contemplative books as The Te of Piglet and The Tao of Pooh and watched movie classics by directors such as Charlie Chaplin, Blake Edwards and David Lean.
“I spent a lot of time by myself and more time with my friends and eating well and going to the gym. I had been riddled with that anxiety of ‘Oh my God! Can I pull all this stuff off?’ So I sort of decided to take a step back and not try to keep proving myself over and over again.”
There was another reason. Her biological clock has begun to tick. She may look like a girl, dressed in loose funky jeans, white shirt and a hip, jade-green cloth necklace, but she’s very much a woman now - one who says she’s contemplating having children.
“Kids, marriage, I am evaluating all that stuff,” she says, “and I am excited that I don’t have the answers.”
Would Barrymore have to be married to have children?
“Definitely not,” she replies. “My mother was a single parent.” She laughs, again with that hint of uncertainty.
“We are no mold, that’s for sure. I have too many friends who are single parents, same-sex couples or in a circumstance where they don’t have a partner. So I know it does not have to be one way.”
And suddenly the reflective shadow that has crept in and faded out during the course of the conversation vanishes, and the bold, bright Drew of the movies reappears.
“I’m at an awesome midpoint,” she says. “I was a wild kid, and I’m still a wild girl. I need to be free to let my hair down. I have to be free to drink, fail in a relationship and be an imperfect human being. I want to screw up.”
She laughs. “I do want to be free.”
Cover and cover story photographs by Kwaku Alston, Stockland Martel, for USA WEEKEND. Hair: Mark Townsend, Starworks Artists; makeup: Pati Dubroff, The Wall Group; wardrobe: Anda + Masha, The Wall Group. Barrymore's outfit: dress, Zac Posen; belt, Lauren Moffatt; necklace and stack bracelets, Giles & Brother; single bracelet, Top Shop
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