Drew Barrymore has a dream guest in mind for her talk show: Britney Spears.
The Charlie’s Angels star spoke to Variety this week and shared that she would love to talk to the singer, who, last November, was released from her highly controversial conservatorship — orchestrated by her father Jamie Spears — after more than 13 years.
“We can have a unique conversation,” Barrymore explained of why she wants to chat with the pop star. “There’s not a ton of us out there who have publicly lost our freedom, had breakdowns in front of everyone, become punchlines and fought our way back.”
While Barrymore was never under a conservatorship, she also dealt with complicated family matters as a young person growing up in the entertainment industry. In her 2015 memoir Wildflower, The Santa Clarita Diet alum wrote that her mother — who she shared would take her to Studio54 to party instead of school — put her in a mental institution when she wasn’t sure how to handle her behavior.
“I was out of control due to working since I was 11 months old and what that had done to my childhood, which made me grow up too fast,” Barrymore wrote at the time. “Work was a very positive thing in my life, and sadly it had been taken away, because my mother also put me in an institution because she felt helpless. But when people found out, they just wrote me off as damaged goods, and I sadly understood that.”
Spears and Barrymore have met before. In a recent Instagram post, the “Toxic” artist gushed that both Barrymore and Kate Hudson were the “most beautiful people” she had ever met.
The host responded to the kind words on her talk show days later.
“Everyone at the show, because I was down here filming, came running up to me and was like did you see? And I just said I’ll see it when I get upstairs,” Barrymore recalled. “I wanna be, like, thoughtful. I wanna read every word that she says. I really want to respond thoughtfully, I really want to choose my words the right way.”
She also praised the idea of Spears writing a book about her experience, calling it a “smart and intelligent way to tell her story.”
Last year, Barrymore spoke out in support of the end of Spears’s conservatorship.
“This is about her and her life,” she said in an August 2021 interview with Entertainment Tonight. “Everybody deserves the freedom to make mistakes or a success of their life and everything in between. That is what a life is.”
