Drew Barrymore Says Her Daughters Are Ready for Her to Get Back Into Acting

It’s been a while since Drew Barrymore has had a major acting role, but that may soon change, the actress revealed exclusively to Us Weekly.

Barrymore, 49, said that her daughters, Olive, 11, and Frankie, 10, have given their blessings for her to return to acting.

“I think the girls are like, ‘Yeah, Mom, we’re doing great. If you want to go do that, go back and do things,’” she said on Tuesday, May 7. “So getting that permission from them was really huge and sort of opened up my mind, so we’ll see.”

Though Barrymore hasn’t been acting much lately, she has hosted The Drew Barrymore Show on CBS since 2020, which has run for over 1,000 episodes and counting. She is also cofounder of Flower Films, the production company behind many of her most successful movies, including Charlie’s Angels, 50 First Dates and Donnie Darko.

One of the first scripts she says she developed with Flower Films was for a Wizard of Oz prequel. Barrymore says she has been trying to get it made ever since.

“It was one of the first scripts I fell in love with and we developed it,” she said. “So it feels very personal to me, and I think it’s just lying in a vault somewhere. So as a director, oh, my God, I would give anything to do that.”

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Now that her daughters have signed off on her return to acting, Barrymore is more open to the idea.

“It was sort of not really available to me for many years,” she explained. “And I did try, but [it] wasn’t feeling right for me. And I would have some really fun times getting to play a character, like on Santa Clarita Diet. I loved the character but I wasn’t able to fit it in with the type of mom I want to be.”

Barrymore was a star and executive producer on Santa Clarita Diet for its three-season run from 2017 to 19. The next year, she starred in the film The Stand In, but her acting credits since then have been sparse.

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If that does change, it probably won’t be until after a little more mother-daughter time. She said that after Olive and Frankie — whom she shares with ex-husband Will Kopelman — finish summer camp, she plans to travel with them, then spend some time focusing on herself, adding that she’s never been very good at slowing down.

Barrymore spoke to Us amid a campaign with Ring and the ASPCA that’s designed to encourage pet parents to raise funds for animal shelters in need by sharing their favorite pet videos and pictures.

“I’ve been rescuing since I was 19, so this really, really spoke to me,” she told Us of the partnership. “It was the immediate reason I signed on in the first place. … We’ve thought about cameras to watch our babies, but this was a new concept to me, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I totally get this. I love this.’ And the fact that it was an ASPCA-oriented thing, I was proud enough to win an ASPCA award years ago for my work with them. So I’m very invested about why this is meaningful.”

With reporting by Travis Cronin