Drew Barrymore says she thought she could never change when she was drinking.

The 47-year-old actress added her 2016 divorce from Will Kopelman was so “messy” and painful it sent her on a downward spiral of boozing.

She told People magazine in an interview published Tuesday (27.12.22) she “broke” after their “excruciating” split, adding: “It just took me down. It was just trying to... feel good – and alcohol totally did that for me.

“The drinking thing for me was a constant, like, ‘You cannot change. You are weak and incapable of doing what’s best for you. You keep thinking you will master this thing, and it’s getting the better of you’.”

“After the life I planned for my kids didn’t work out... it was a messy, painful, excruciating walk-through-the-fire-and-come-back-to-life kind of trajectory.”

Drew, who has daughters Olive, 10, and Frankie, eight, told last December how she had been sober for two-and-half-years as she felt drinking did not “serve” her.

She added about feeling her sobriety was “liberating” in an essay published in November for her ‘Drew’ magazine: “One of the bravest things you can do is slay those dragons and finally change an awful cycle in which you’ve found yourself stuck.

“(I have) finally become free of the torture of guilt and dysfunction.”

She added in a blog in October she also abstained from sex in the wake of her split from Will as she said she is “not a person who needs sex and has to go out there and engage with people on that level”.