Drew Barrymore has become the latest high-profile celebrity to cut alcohol from their lives, as a growing trend towards sobriety continues to capture people’s curiosity.
The Charlie’s Angels and Santa Clarita Diet actor and producer revealed this week she had been on a “quiet, confident” journey to quit alcohol for good, joining the likes of Chrissy Teigen, Daniel Radcliffe and Adele.
The wave of booze-free celebrities is part of a wider shift to alcohol-free lifestyles that started well before the pandemic.
“I’m gonna say something for the first time in a long time – I have not had a drink of alcohol in two and a half years,” Barrymore said during an interview on CBS mornings, which aired on Saturday (Australian time).
“It was something I realised just did not serve me and my life.”
Barrymore, 46, said she kept her struggle with an alcohol-free lifestyle a secret to keep her addiction issues in check.
“Now it’s been long enough where I’m in a lifestyle that I know is really working on a high road for my little journey, and there’s so much peace finally being had where there were demons,” she said.
Barrymore is one of many A-list celebrities to have recently kicked booze to the kerb, with Teigen becoming a vocal advocate in December 2020 when she announced she had been sober for four weeks.
“Sober. I know that’s weird but it’s like … a different world for me. Everything is new and better. Very happy,” she said in a tweet, accompanying her family on a trip to Washington DC.
British singer Adele last month said she had also cut alcohol from her life, during her divorce from Simon Konecki.
“I stopped drinking. That’s one great way of really sort of getting to know yourself is being sober,” she said in the November 19 tell-all with CBS.
Meanwhile, Harry Potter star Radcliffe opened up about his alcohol problems in 2020, and how he had to quit alcohol to move forward from the role as Harry.
“A lot of drinking that happened towards the end of Potter and for a little bit after it finished, it was panic, a little bit not knowing what to do next – not being comfortable enough in who I was to remain sober,” he said in a BBC Radio 4 interview.
The reduction in wine, beer and spirit consumption across Hollywood can also be seen in Australia, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics noting that the trend started in 2008-09.
Data released in 2018 shows that alcohol consumption per person in 2016-17 fell to the lowest level since 1961-62.
Meanwhile, “sober curious” became one of the country’s most thought of and talked about words in 2021, shortlisted as a candidate to Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year award.
Macquarie Dictionary defined the new word as “having an interest in reducing one’s consumption of alcohol or in giving it up altogether”.
