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WhatCulture's argument that Drew Barrymore broke typecasting in the worst possible way here


https://whatculture.com/film/10-actors-who-broke-typecasting-in-the-worst-way-possible?page=6

Drew Barrymore started her career as an adorable little girl in the hit Stephen Spielberg movie ET. From there Barrymore garnered the image of Hollywood Sweetheart; everybody loved her and everybody wanted to work with her.

How She Broke It:

Barrymore took a role in the star studded cast of Batman Forever. Yes that's right, Drew Barrymore was one of the sucker celebrities that believed a role in the infamously bad Batman movie would HELP their career. Barrymore wanted to shed her image of being the Hollywood Sweetheart by taking a role as one of the movie's MANY villains.

What Went Wrong:

As previously mentioned, the movie was notoriously awful. But that isn't why her choice was bad.

The choice was bad because while the role may have been for a villain, her character was hilariously and stereotypically nice. Barrymore's character was literally called Sugar and she was the sweet counterpart to Debi Mazar's Spice. Yep, Sugar and Spice. Barrymore basically just played a ramped up version of her real life persona, and she picked the worst movie possible to do it in. She has since struggled to fully shake off her image, taking roles mostly in rom-coms and chick-flicks. Even her role as a carnivorous zombie in Santa Clarita Diet perpetuates her good-girl image, if not in a more self-aware way.


I don't at all agree with the writer's assessment here. Drew didn't really begin to consciously cultivate a "good girl" image as an adult actress until she did The Wedding Singer, Ever After, and Never Been Kissed. You have to keep in mind, that Drew when she was trying to rebuilt her Hollywood career after her stints in rehab, was pigeonholed as a trashy, dangerous, "jailbait" girl in stuff like Poison Ivy, Guncrazy, or that Amy Fisher TV movie. These pretty much went hand in hand with how she was generally perceived by the public at the time.

It seems like the writer just assumed that Drew Barrymore always played wholesome roles just because she may have been like that as a child star. Drew herself said that she sought out to clean-up her public image after her flashing episode on David Letterman's talk show in 1995.

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