John Malkovich was shocked meeting Drew Barrymore in a club when she was 12
John Malkovich has recalled the moment he met Drew Barrymore in a Los Angles club when she was just 12 years old.
John Malkovich was shocked to meet Drew Barrymore in a club when she was just 12 years old.
The 72-year-old actor has recalled a moment in his 30s when the pair met in around 1987, and he was surprised to see her in that environment at such a young age.
During an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the 51-year-old star asked John: "Is it true that we met up in the club?"
He said: "My memory is this. It was a club in Los Angeles. It was the late ‘80s, and you came over to me. And you complimented me on some work that I had done.”
John had two immediate thoughts when Drew approached him.
He added: "The first one, I said, ‘Well, if I’m ever half as good as you were in E.T., I’ll feel self-actualised'.
“Then the second thing I was thinking is, ‘What are you doing in this club?’ You were like 12 years old.”
Drew replied: "I was a club kid."
The former child star has been open about her past struggles after rising to fame at seven years old, finding herself partying with adults at clubs like Studio 54 and Limelight.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial director Steven Spielberg has admitted he wished he could save her, but he was limited in what he could do.
He told Vulture back in 2023: “She was staying up way past her bedtime, going to places she should have only been hearing about, and living a life at a very tender age that I think robbed her of her childhood.
“Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”
The filmmaker told the publication that Drew once came into his office wearing red lipstick and he told her to wipe it off.
He also tried to give her some more normal childhood experiences - gifting her with a cat named after her E.T. character and taking her on trips to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.
During the interview the actress described Spielberg as "the only person in my life to this day that ever was a parental figure".
Drew, who has daughters Olive, 14, and Frankie, 12, with her ex-husband Will Kopelman, has been open about her struggles to reconcile with her parents after her difficult childhood.
Her mother Jaid was her manager when she was a child star and regularly took her to parties around Hollywood, which exposed her to drugs and alcohol – before she landed in rehab aged 13.
A year later, she was placed in a California mental health facility for a year and a half and by 14, Drew became emancipated from her mother and father John, who died in 2004 following a diagnosis of multiple myeloma.
She decided to quit booze for good in 2019 and announced her sobriety in 2021.
Speaking on her show at the time, she tearfully recalled: “I was a real wild child and I just got so out of control that no one knew what to do with me.
“They drove me here in the middle of the night and they walked me through those two doors and when you go through those two doors you do not come out. And I was there for a year-and-a-half.
“I will never lose sight of this part of my story and I have seen and been through things and they’ve helped me just recognise in all of us that we go through stuff.
“And it can’t be embarrassing. It has to be our strengths, it has to be something that we can be proud of because we overcame it and we look back with honour and humour.”
