The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has now apologized for that weird Drew Barrymore interview
The saga of the weird-as-fuck Egypt Air Drew Barrymore interview continues today, with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—i.e., the folks who hand out the Golden Globes—now stepping in to apologize for their part in its publication, even though, as far as we can tell, they do not appear to have had any part in its publication.
For those who missed it, the Barrymore interview was discovered recently in a copy of Egypt Air’s in-flight magazine, Horus, and is, to put it mildly, incredibly strange. It’s full of typos and stilted English, for one thing, and also directly contradicts several things Barrymore has said in other interviews about being a working mother. Oh, and it’s inordinately obsessed with her weight. And it opens with an unsourced paragraph about how she has romantic woes, obviously stemming from psychological damage inflicted upon her by a lack of stable father figure. And her representatives have entirely denied that she ever participated in it, at all! You know, perfectly normal celebrity profile stuff like that.
The HFPA gets roped into all this because the piece’s stated author, Aida Takla O’Reilly, is a former president of the organization. Someone purporting to be Takla (or Tekla, as she’s credited in the Egypt Air piece) has vouched for the authenticity of the interview, calling it “genuine and far from fake” on Twitter. Now, the HFPA has weighed in, issuing a statement to Vanity Fair in which it said, “We are aware that an article under the byline of our member Dr. Aida Takla-O’Reilly regarding Drew Barrymore, published in EgyptAir’s Horus magazine, has come into question. Based on our preliminary investigation, we understand that parts of the article in question were not written by Dr. Takla-O’Reilly and that other portions of the article may have come from other sources. We regret any distress caused to Ms. Barrymore by this article.”
So, there we have it: A definitive statement on this whole debacle, issued by an organization that had nothing to do with writing it, on behalf of an author who apparently didn’t write most of it either, and about a movie star who didn’t participate in the interview in the first place. Many thanks to the HFPA for clearing all of this up.