Drew Barrymore felt her "whole life was falling apart" when she split from Will Kopelman.
The ‘Santa Clarita Diet’ star – who plays a zombie real estate agent in the Netflix series – can relate to her character’s "awakening" and enjoyed being able to have an "outlet" for her emotions after she split from Will.
She said: "I think this woman is going through an awakening … I loved getting to have that outlet. It was a safe place for me to spend my summer while my whole life was just sort of falling apart.
"I was just in a really low point and I read the script and it made me laugh and it made me feel something. It took me out of my own world that wasn’t super pleasant at the time and I thought, ‘Maybe other people wanna be take out of their unpleasant times and be transported into something that’s cool and different."
And the 41-year-old actress – who has Olive, four, and Frankie, two, with her former spouse – admits the role was a "total metaphor" for her life and enjoyed being back at work after a bit of a lull.
Speaking at a Netflix panel to promote her show ‘Santa Clarita Diet’, she shared: "I really was excited about playing a woman who was becoming empowered, losing weight, pulling her s**t together. Finding that when your life really does fall apart, you don’t ditch everything in it. You have to become you and take all the wonderful things in it and just find these new roads. And for me, it was a total metaphor for my life. I felt really lucky.
"I hadn’t been working for years … I was a mom who was raising her kids and I stepped aside and put everything on the back burner. I did like two movies in eight years, I just wasn’t participating in a lot of aspects so this to me was such a lucky fortunate thing."
Drew Barrymore: My life was ‘falling apart’ when I split from ex
