Drew Barrymore has a secret weapon she can break out whenever her talk show needs a little enlivening. She can, with minimal effort, regress in age until she becomes Josie “Grossie” Geller, her painfully enthusiastic teenage character from 1999's Never Been Kissed.
Barrymore’s done this before in order to properly interview fellow youth Ben Platt and the cast of Dear Evan Hansen, and, faced with Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle of Pen15, she’s returned to it once again.
After being welcomed to Josie’s bedroom, Erskine and Konkle appear in their TV show counterparts’ braces and bowl cut to immediately get down to business, discussing newsworthy topics like how they became friends by dancing to Salt-N-Peppa together at a talent show.
Barrymore’s Josie is a solid interviewer, showing off some of her own dance moves and asking the difficult questions: Like, for example, whether her guests have kissed anyone yet and their opinions on boys with frosted tips. The meeting wraps up with a declaration of undying friendship and plans to head out to the mall before making out with inanimate objects later.
Erskine and Konkle’s teenaged versions may be more realistically embarrassing than Barrymore’s cartoonish version, but the trio gel well enough anyway that an extended clip of them judging Brad Pitt, Nokia cell phones, and lip gloss in a round of “hot or not” is worth watching, too.
“I thought a fitting way to display my love and admiration of these women [was] to get into my own inner awkward young girl,” Barrymore says during the introduction, providing us with more rationale for the decision than was required for the set-up.
Now that she’s done this more than once on her show, we imagine Barrymore needs very little encouragement to get back into the pink dress for further interviews—maybe with the Stranger Things kids if they aren’t all well into their 20s by the time the next season’s promo tour comes around.
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