Ever tried explaining the ’90s to a Gen Alpha child? Drew Barrymore skipped that lecture and let the photos do the talking on Tuesday, February 24. The actress and daytime host posted an Instagram video that featured present-day Drew (trying to floss dance) and a series of throwback snaps from her teenage years. The text read as if her daughters, Olive and Frankie, asked, “Mom, what were you like in the 90s?”
The post was set to the Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 hit Iris. In it, we see Barrymore with her signature cropped blonde hair. In one of the photos, she is cuddling a goat. In another, she beams at the camera during an era before filters and FaceTune.
“Oh, the 90s! I went down memory lane looking at these photographs,” she captioned the post.
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In many ways, Barrymore defines the ’90s. Being against the norm, her messiness was refreshing at the time.
The comments on this throwback post thus had other celebrities like Florence Pugh gushing, “You were just the coolest ever with the coolest hair and the coolest smile.” Rachel Zegler declared her “still the baddest in the game,” while another fan answered to the actress’ daughters and said, “Your mom WAS THE 90’s and everything cool about it.”
But the post lands differently when you remember what Barrymore hid behind the smiles.
Before she became the host of The Drew Barrymore Show, she was a child star who broke out at age 7 in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and had been working since she was a baby. By age 13, she said, she had “a real car crash of a life” and “truly lost everything,” so at one point nobody wanted to work with her. That period taught her the most valuable lesson of her life: nothing is a given.
On a January 2026 episode of her talk show, Barrymore spoke directly to a photo of herself at age 10 and recalled how adults critiqued her body. She remembered being told she didn’t look the way she did in E.T., or was “too heavy” and “not blonde enough.”
Now at the age of 51, Barrymore describes the battle for self-worth as an “internal war” that takes decades to win. She believes that real happiness is a choice, as is self-acceptance. She added that if it takes time to get there, that’s okay.
drew barrymore’s polaroids taken by makeup artist on the set of ‘charlie’s angels’ 2000 pic.twitter.com/jBCBbDAB60
— ♓︎ (@PISCESPRADA) September 3, 2023
Seen in that light, the Instagram post proves how resilient she has been.
Barrymore still radiates that same warmth and has spoken about maintaining an “infallible work ethic.” So when her daughters ask what she was like in the ’90s, the answer is that she was a winner. Isn’t that the most ’90s thing of all?
