Dark Days at Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens has its broadcast premiere April 18th, a week from tomorrow. Today, The Daily Beast profiles Drew Barrymore:

In her new HBO film Grey Gardens, Barrymore’s character, Little Edie Beale, a cousin of Jacqueline Onassis and once the beauty queen of East Hampton, suffers from alopecia—constantly losing her brunette mane (and her hopeful shot at an acting or dancing career). So one night, in a fit of animalistic madness, Edie chops off what she has left, crying and screaming as she cuts. It’s an arresting moment on screen, and as good a portrayal of a woman’s descent into madness as audiences will see on television this year. The scissors scene cements it: Drew Barrymore can really act, and this is the role that will make people notice.

Barrymore has advice for anyone who thinks a movie portrayal of real mental illness is crass sensationalism:

“People who say this is exploitative are bullshit,” she tells The Daily Beast. “Anyone who is a naysayer should pull a stick out of their you know what. You know? Get a heart and get into the art and the life and celebrate with us all; don’t be on the other side—it’s really not fun over there.”

About her performance TDB has this to say:

Barrymore not only embodies Little Edie perfectly as a mimic—she has the accent, the silly dances, the sidelong glances at the camera completely right—but she also pulls something else out of herself, something audiences have not seen from the actress before. She is no longer the little girl from ET or the bouncy twenty something who would take to the red carpet with daisies in her hair, but a grown woman (literally—Edie is in her 50s for much of the film), one with complexities and thwarted ambitions, as well as a wild creativity that continued to blossom until her death in 2002.

Little Edie is a dream role for any actress—a case study in madness and the tragic downfall of the wealthy—but after seeing Drew Barrymore embody her, it is difficult to think of any other woman who could have portrayed Beale with such delicate buoyancy.