Cameron Diaz: ‘Drew Barrymore’s booze battle was difficult to watch’
Cameron Diaz has spoken about her struggle to watch her long-time pal Drew Barrymore battle with booze in the wake of her split from husband Will Kopelman.
The 50-year-old actress, who starred with her long-term friend Drew, 48, in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ after being friends with her since the 1990s, struggled to watch her pal descend into depression and drink after she divorced her third husband Will Kopelman, 44, in 2016.
Cameron told the LA Times about friends staging a “quasi-intervention” to try and pull Drew back from the brink: “I knew that if we all stuck with her and gave her the support she needed, she would find her way.
“I have absolute faith in her. You can’t even comprehend how hard it was to be her as a child, and then she shot out the other end with the ability to save herself.”
Cameron Diaz added Drew’s problems grew worse when her therapist, Barry Michels, quit treating her, saying: “He just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It was really about my drinking.
“I said, ‘I get it. I’ve never respected you more. You see I’m not getting better. And I hope, one day, that I can earn your trust back.’”
Drew, who had daughters Olive, 10, and Frankie, eight, with Will, was married to him from 2012 and after turning to drink to numb the pain of their split, said she finally decided to quit booze in 2019 when she started fronting her TV series ‘The Drew Barrymore Show’.
She said: “I think the opportunity at a show like this really hit me. I was like, ‘I can’t handle this unless I’m in a really clear place.’”
It wasn’t her first battle with the bottle as aged only 13 she entered rehab for drug and alcohol abuse, before she tried suicide a year later and went back into treatment,
The actress – who had her first drink at nine before moving on to marijuana aged 10 and cocaine at 12 – said in December she feared she could never change when she was drinking.
She told People magazine she “broke” after her “excruciating” split from Will, adding: “It just took me down. It was just trying to… feel good – and alcohol totally did that for me.
“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’.
“After the life I planned for my kids didn’t work out… it was a messy, painful, excruciating walk-through-the-fire-and-come-back-to-life kind of trajectory.”
She said about feeling sobriety was “liberating” in an essay published in November for her ‘Drew’ magazine: “One of the bravest things you can do is slay those dragons and finally change an awful cycle in which you’ve found yourself stuck.
“(I have) finally become free of the torture of guilt and dysfunction.”
She added in a blog in October she also abstained from sex in the wake of her split from Will as she said she is “not a person who needs sex and has to go out there and engage with people on that level”.
