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Drew drops in

BEING A MOVIE star, and more specifically Hollywood’s reigning queen of romantic comedy, has its drawbacks.

Drew Barrymore knows that firsthand. For example, very few women have to take a businesslike approach to kissing. When you make romantic comedies for a living, however, kissing attractive men is part of the job description – and not always the easiest part.

“You’re lucky if you get a good one,” the 35-year-old actress says during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, dressed in a past-her-hips, black-and-blue-plaid shirt and jeans. “You meet and you think, ‘Whoooeeee, thank god!’

“The worst is if you have to do it with someone who is not good,” she adds. “Then it’s up to you as the woman to work your butt off. Do you know what it’s like to be paired up with someone in a scene who can’t? Suddenly you’re really working on your own game. You doubt yourself. You’re asking, ‘Is it me?”’

Unsurprisingly Barrymore – whose romantic co-stars have included Eric Bana, Kevin Connolly, Jimmy Fallon, Hugh Grant, Matthew McConaughey, Edward Norton, Chris O’Donnell, Adam Sandler, Dougray Scott, Michael Vartan, Luke Wilson and Steve Zahn, among others – isn’t naming any names.

Asked which of her leading men might fall short in the lip-lock department, she shakes a mane of long, curly, blonde hair and laughs.

“Oh, that’s never happening,” she says. “I will never tell.”

LONG’S DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP

Presumably the list wouldn’t include her current leading man, real-life boyfriend Justin Long, who stars opposite her in Going the Distance, set to open in the States next month. Barrymore plays a New York waitress who dreams of being a newspaper writer, with Long as a young music executive who has chronic problems with women. The two meet, fall in love ... and then are thrown a continent apart when she gets her dream job, but it’s in San Francisco. Soon the two are logging some serious frequent-flyer miles – and also some serious phone action.

In other words, this isn’t romantic comedy a la fairy tale, as in some of Barrymore’s previous films. There’s a randy scene in which the two are so happy to see each other again that they don’t make it past the dining-room table.

“It’s different from your typical romantic comedy,” director Nanette Burstein says in a separate interview. “The characters are quite uncensored in the movie.”

Barrymore, who has been upfront about her past troubles with drugs and alcohol, even gets “tired and emotional” in the film.

“I was excited to play a new kind of character for me,” she says. “To tell you the truth, I was at a point in my life and my career that I didn’t want to play a cuckoo, wacky woman or do a role-reversal character. I wanted to play someone just like the woman in this movie. She’s someone who can hang out with guys and also loves women.

“She’s real,” Barrymore says. “She has spine and she’s fun. I can relate to that kind of woman.”

The script’s broad humour was a welcome relief after Barrymore’s last project, her critically acclaimed performance as Little Edie in HBO’s bleak Grey Gardens (2009).

“That was one of the highlights of my entire career,” she says, “but it was a very dramatic piece. It was a pleasure to go to a set where I got to be funny and improvise. I was also able to work in a more free-flowing way.

“And for once I didn’t have to censor myself,” Barrymore adds. “I knew from the start that this film was going to be rated R, which was a great thing, because I could be very honest about relationships.”

She particularly enjoyed exploring the character’s dark side for laughs.

“One of the challenges I was most excited about was doing an inebriated scene,” Barrymore says. “We focused on what type she was, what could I ad lib during those scenes? It’s a moment in the film when my character is really angry. It was a matter of how she would let loose.

“It was the most fun day at work – ever,” Barrymore concludes. “I could just let go.”

Christina Applegate plays the married, obsessive sister of Barrymore’s character.

“I love the casting,” Barrymore says, “because we do look alike. I think we could have come from the same womb.”

The actresses are old friends, she adds, and she views Applegate as a mentor.

“We used to be in a dance class together as kids,” Barrymore says. “She looked really good in Spandex and I did not. Even at that age, I celebrated her while I was horrified and hid out in the corner.”

For her part, Applegate says in a separate interview, she had wanted to work with Barrymore for years.

“The key to Drew is that you look at her, both onscreen and in person, and you see inside. She doesn’t hide her emotions. You really know her at a deep level. That’s what makes her so appealing as an actress – there is no hiding.”

LIFE MATTERS

That appeal has made Barrymore an audience favourite since she co-starred in Steven Spielberg’s classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). She was only seven when the film opened, and she has been candid about the troubles that plagued her next decade. She rebounded, however, with Poison Ivy (1992), and went on to such films as Boys on the Side (1995), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Scream (1996), The Wedding Singer (1998) and Music and Lyrics (2007).

Along the way she became one of the industry’s most respected actor/producers. Her production company, Flower Films, has been responsible for such hits as Charlie’s Angels (2000), Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003) and He’s Just Not That into You (2009), and she made her directorial debut with Whip It (2009).

Her personal aesthetic, she says, is a simple one: She wants to make the kind of films she loves to watch as an audience member.

“I find films work the best when you’re invested in the whole group of people up on the screen and not just one or two,” Barrymore says. “I love the movies Christopher Guest makes, where you’re into everyone’s story. It’s an alumni feeling to the project. I love when the chemistry goes far beyond just the main characters.”

Offscreen the twice-divorced Barrymore has had an on-again/off-again relationship with Long since they met during the making of He’s Just Not That into You. It’s apparently on again, but neither wants to discuss it for public consumption.

It’s hard, Barrymore admits with a sigh, to maintain a relationship when both people involved are in the movie business.

“It’s not easy,” she says. “You want to see each other, but you can’t because of schedules or obligations. It’s really tough to do everything that you want to do in a day.”

Other than that, all she’ll reveal is whom she’s sleeping with.

“My dogs are the most cherished things in my life,” Barrymore says.