As TIFF reached high tide over the last 24 hours and a bit – Johnny Depp enjoying a bite at Bosk in the Shangri-La, John Travolta schmoozing at Byblos, Jessica Chastain and Julianne Moore doing the Entertainment Weekly bash at the Thompson, the wonderful Elisabeth Moss lighting up the annual Sony Classics dinner at Creme Brasserie – leave it to Drew Barrymore to put me straight about something I'd always kinda wondered: Do actors cry when watching their own movies?
“My skull hurts from crying,” is how the sweetie put it, talking about her latest, the film that might take the Five- Box Kleenex Award for Achievement in Induced Sobbing, presented by a special two-judge jury made up of Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Called Miss You Already, it's a wallowing weepie already, complete with a mismatched femme pact at its centre (Barrymore and Toni Collette) and a terminal disease lurking around the corner. Immediately dubbed the new Beaches – i.e. Beaches for a retweet generation – it likes to make you cry the way Bill Maher likes skinny ties, Tom Cruise digs stunts and the extent to which J.Lo enjoys back-up dancers.
When I mentioned the peculiar catharsis of wailing to that particular movie - New York's 92Y even hosted a communal cry-along to Beaches a few years back - Barrymore forcefully nodded her head. We were, incidentally, at a sun-down party at Soho House, hosted by Grey Goose, following the premiere of her film, and the actress, who famously started out playing E.T.'s friend at age four, was giving particularly good Barrymore, arriving in a boho maxi-dress with windswept hair straight out of an extra-long-weekend in Big Sur.
Watching the Hollywood heiress light up the room, I was reminded how it could have gone so wrong. In fact, it did. One of the original hellraisers – oh, what TMZ would have done with her back then, if it existed – Drew was a regular at Studio 54 as a child, drinking and smoking by the time she was 11, in rehab by 14, back in rehab following a suicide attempt, and the subject of a nudie spread in Playboy by 19. (Her goddad, Steven Spielberg, famously gave her a quilt for her next birthday, with a note that instructed “cover yourself up” enclosed with copies of her Playboy pics.) It's all no secret, now. A batch of B-movies transpired. And then: a 1995 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman that put the young starlet in the pop culture cauldron, oh yes, when she climbed on top of David's desk and bared her breasts to him.
Somewhere along the line, though – post-Charlie's Angels (which she produced) and several dead-end relationships – Drew found purpose as well as a groove. Now, 40, she's a mini-empire unto herself with a cosmetics line of her own, various book projects, continued success in movie-land, so many other side-gigs and a marriage to a bona fide Upper East scion, with whom she has two little ones. You hear that, Lindsay Lohan? In the celebrity hurricane that is TIFF, Barrymore comes to us a survivor.
My second-favourite run-in at this party (which, BTW, included a live ukulele performance) was meeting the iconic singer-songwriter Diane Warren. She of the twelve Grammy nominations and seven Academy Award nominations. She who has famously penned for everyone from Tina Turner to Celine Dion to Aerosmith to Lady Gaga...to Beyoncé. She did the soundtrack for Miss You Already and had only one answer when I asked if she got verklempt watching the flick.
“I've watched it three times...and I've cried three times,” Warren told me.
Meanwhile: It was 50 shades of fill-in-your-own-blank when another Hollywood multi-gen wandered into the annual InStyle party, presented by Max Mara and held Saturday with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Dakota Johnson! It was the first time I'd seen her in person, and I was really struck by her beauty. Making her way through the swish Windsor Arms courtyard, where the party always happens – flooded this year in cranberry-hue lighting and food and flowers galore – Dakota eventually found the “cool kids” banquette, where the star-density was so big at one point that Susan Sarandon, Sarah Silverman and Naomi Watts – in that unlikely order – sat practically nape to nape, like commuters on a rush-hour train. It was a Silverman sandwich!
Other passersby at the shindig included Benicio del Toro, Paul Dano, Brie Larson, Rachel Weisz, Michael Shannon, Zoe Kazan, Christian Slater, etc., etc.