Cameron Diaz says she gave Drew Barrymore “the support she needed” during the talk show host’s struggles with alcohol.
The newly unretired actress admitted the experience was “difficult to watch” in a Los Angeles Times profile on her “Charlie’s Angels” co-star published Sunday.
“I knew that if we all stuck with her and gave her the support she needed, she would find her way,” Diaz, 50, added, saying she has “absolute faith” in Barrymore’s recovery.
“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,” she continued.
Barrymore, 48, revealed in December 2021 that she had been sober for two and a half years.
The following year, she confessed to drinking heavily to “numb the pain” of her 2016 divorce from her third husband, Will Kopelman.
Barrymore wed the art consultant, 44, in 2012, and they currently co-parent daughters Olive, 10, and Frankie, 8.
“The drinking thing for me was a constant,” she told People in December 2022 of the fallout of their “excruciating” breakup.
“It just took me down,” the “Never Been Kissed” star, who first went to rehab when she was 13, explained. “It was just trying to … feel good — and alcohol totally did that for me.”
In fact, her post-divorce drinking became so intense that Barrymore’s therapist Barry Michaels quit.
“He just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” she explained in the new LA Times story. “I said, ‘I get it. … You see I’m not getting better. And I hope, one day, that I can earn your trust back.’”
Although Barrymore’s friends and Michaels called her out on her addiction, she didn’t stop drinking until she filmed the first episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show” in 2019.
“I think the opportunity at a show like this really hit me,” she explained in the profile. “I was like, ‘I can’t handle this unless I’m in a really clear place.’
“I kept thinking, ‘I’ll master this. I’ll figure it out,'” the “E.T.” star continued. “And finally, I just realized: ‘You’ve never mastered this, and you never will.'”