Drew Barrymore on Why She Regrets “Chaste” ‘Playboy’ Photos: “Never Knew There Would Be an Internet”
Drew Barrymore gets 'vulnerable' on Instagram about parenthood, social media and wanting to 'protect [her kids] the way I wanted to be protected.
Drew Barrymore is looking back at her Playboy cover nearly 30 years later, but now with a different pair of eyes since becoming a mother to two daughters.
The actress opened up in a lengthy Instagram post on Friday, titled “PHONE HOME” (referencing her 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), saying she wanted to “put myself out there as a parent” in a “very vulnerable way.”
This included Barrymore recalling her childhood in Hollywood and growing up in an “unorthodox” way, with her “experience of being so out there in the world and going to adult environments and working” as a child. The actress also recounted posing for the January 1995 issue of Playboy, right before her 20th birthday.
“I was around plenty of hedonistic scenarios at parties and even in my own home where the viewing was of highly sensitive natures and caused me tremendous shame,” she wrote. “We, as kids, are not meant to see these images. And, yes, I was even a big exhibitionist when I was young due to these environments I was in. I thought of it as art, and I still do not judge it.”
Barrymore continued, “But when I did a chaste artistic moment in Playboy in my early 20s, I thought it would be a magazine that was unlikely to resurface because it was paper. I never knew there would be an internet. I didn’t know so many things.”
Now, as a parent, the Drew Barrymore Show host is determined to “protect them [her kids] the way I wanted to be protected.” She “never thought in my wildest dreams that kids would be in my boat of too much excess and access” with modern-day technology and social media, which is one reason she isn’t ready for her daughters, Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, to have smartphones yet.