Drew Barrymore and Tom Green's reunion was delightfully odd
Drew Barrymore kicked off her (sometimes bizarre) new talk show with a Charlie’s Angels reunion with Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz, but where was The Chad? Tom Green’s role may have been too small to warrant a spot at the Angels reunion, but he did get his own segment on The Drew Barrymore Show Friday. In what was apparently their first time being in the same room in over 15 years, Green had come to his ex-wife’s talk show to promote his new podcast, The Tom Green Interview. But the former couple spent way more time talking about their dogs and that time their house burned down—both with their own signature awkwardness. To steal a descriptor from our William Hughes’ piece on The Drew Barrymore Show last week, it was all oddly “hypnotic.”
“I’m just thinking about, I’m thinking about a lot of stories and things that happened. You know, I remember when we were together, you had your amazing dogs, Flossie and Templeton and Vivian,” Green says in a clip from the show, his own dog, Charlie, sitting in his lap. “I remember one time we were…. It was Christmas and you came up to Canada to my parents’ house for Christmas. And, I flew Flossie up to Canada for Christmas. And didn’t tell you. You were sitting on the floor of the house that I grew up in as a kid, and I opened the door, and Flossie walked out and I remember you looking at Flossie and you thought, ‘Oh, there’s a dog that looks like Flossy.’ And then you realized it was Flossy. And it was, it was. It was very cute. And so I sort of have this lifelong love of dogs now because of a Flossy and Templeton and Vivian.”
Apparently Flossy was a relative of Lassie, because Barrymore then pivots to a story about how the dog saved them when their house caught on fire in 2001: “We’re standing up on the top of the hill—the house was in the canyons—and when I’m watching the telephone poles explode. And the house was a barn. It was built out of wood—wood floors, walls, and ceiling. So it went like an ACME cartoon…. And I was just standing there in such shock…. And you like leaned into my ear and you started singing [the Entertainment Tonight theme].”
At this point, Green seems to take a little umbrage with the story, seemingly because he feels it paints him as not taking it seriously. “But it made me laugh!” responds Barrymore. “In that moment that everything was so dark and scary and confusing, you lightened it up for me. You made me laugh!” she adds, almost…yelling? “And I will never forget that. In the middle of what was such a terrifying moment, there’s this one little light in it, and it’s you making me giggle so hard. In the middle of like this darkness came this light, and it was you. And, you know, we just had so many crazy adventures.”
The explanation seems to appease Green’s concern about being colored as goof, so he pulls out a coffee mug with a picture of Barrymore in a brace from the time she sprained her neck doing yoga. “I found this mug in my garage a couple of years ago and I just kinda kept it ’cause I figured someday I might be on your TV show and it’d be fun to have a sip out of the mug,” he explains.
Then things get sappy and Barrymore tears up before her very Barrymore goodbye: “I want to mention that The Tom Green Interview…on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts is out….It will be available….I suggest you go through a library of Tom Green when…you need it most…or…you just.. wanna…feel good. All right?”
If you’d rather watch than read, you can see their full exchange here:
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