Drew's Anger and Darkness

Vivian Baker / HBO In HBO’s Grey Gardens, Drew Barrymore trades in her usually sunny smile to play an eccentric shut-in. Rachel Syme talked to the actress about the Method behind her madness.

Drew Barrymore is tearing her hair out. Rather, she is hacking it off with a pair of kitchen shears. 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.

“People who say this is exploitative are bullshit. 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.”

In playing Edie—a real-life woman that some argue was exploited as a film character for her eccentricities and strangeness—it would be easy for Barrymore to feel that she was capitalizing on a spinster’s mental illness. Instead, her portrayal is loving and tender, a fact she staunchly defends.

“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.”

Watch the trailer for HBO’s Grey Gardens.

To play Little Edie is a difficult challenge for any actress, and one that requires this type of defense. Though the new version of Grey Gardens is a scripted film, it is based on a cult-classic documentary of the same name about Little Edie and her mother (also Edith, known as Big Edie) that Albert and David Maysles made in 1976. The brothers filmed the Edies in their dilapidated Hamptons home (dubbed Grey Gardens), where mother and daughter had become shut-ins after losing their family trust. The house is run-down to the point of condemnation; raccoons in every room, piles of trash covering every surface, an impossible stench of rot, mildew, and aging women. But Little Edie and Big Edie stick together, re-imagining their younger days—Little Edie wanted to act in New York, Big Edie stayed in the Hamptons to live out her days as a Bohemian singer—and entertaining one another with songs and a parade of homemade outfits.

Because Barrymore (and Jessica Lange, who is at once formidable and delightful as Big Edie) had the real women to work from, they had to be especially sensitive in their portrayals. Critics often describe the Beales as mentally ill hermits, and the documentary (and later, the Broadway musical and now, the HBO film that have come out of it) as at least partially taking advantage of their dire situation. Barrymore, however, argues that the film is what Edie would have wanted—she always dreamed of becoming a star in her life, and she was, even if it was through the documentation of her peculiarities.

Barrymore insists that Little Edie, who was so proud of the documentary when it came out, had every right to bask in the attention and to celebrate it: “Most of the time, unfortunately, the people who have changed the world—especially creatively—usually never know it,” Barrymore says. “They die, and then the phenomenon happens. If Edie had some moments where she could see how great she was, and live in that moment, that’s what made me so happy for her. With iconoclastic people it’s all posthumous. Thank God for any of the moments where she got to revel in it.”

And Little Edie is an iconoclastic character, one that is especially apropos to be revisiting in a time of recession. Though Edie and her mother had nothing besides each other, a hot plate, and a record player, and though was deeply unhappy for having given up her New York aspirations to live out her days at Grey Gardens after her mother’s divorce, Litle Edie had an extremely strong sense of self, and of style. In addition to her iconic headscarves to hide her baldness (always festooned with the same gold brooch), Edie invented new ways to wear her old clothes from her socialite days, reinterpreting them in her shut-in poverty. She wore cardigans as hats, turned skirts inside-out and safety-pinned them in a new hem, and turned curtains and sofa upholstery into palazzo pants and cocktail dresses. “This is the best costume for the day,” the real Edie famously told the Maysles in her first shot of the documentary, wearing a strange mash-up of a black bathing suit and a skirt turned upside down. Barrymore nails the line perfectly.