Saeed Adyani / Netflix
Drew Barrymore stars on Netflix's "Santa Clarita Diet."
On the show, Barrymore plays suburban wife and mom Sheila, who inexplicably begins to grow ill and crave human flesh, among other symptoms of the undead. In the role, Barrymore vomits... a lot, tears into people with her teeth, and eats newly killed animals and human flesh.
Barrymore said she came to the role quite hungry, because she was on a diet for the job.
"I was so hungry when we started," she told reporters at a Netflix event on Wednesday. "I was trying to lose 20 pounds, that was my goal. I was 144 when we started and I ended up at 124. In order to do that, you have to eat really sensibly. Listen, she was eating humans. And if you're on an all-protein diet, you would thin out. There's just no question about it. So it gave me a goal line that I committed to."
But Barrymore said that the actual things she had to eat for "Santa Clarita Diet" were almost as gross as what viewers see on the show.
"It was always different stuff," she said. "Some days it was dehydrated apples made to look fleshy. Some days, it was this weird edible rubber that tasted like Jolly Rancher. Sometimes it was like a wet cake to be a fake piece of chicken. Sometimes, it was like a soup that had gone bad to portray vomit, that had actually curdled. It was always a fun cornucopia. Every day was interesting."
Of all that, the 41-year-old actress said there was one fake food that surprised her when it made her sick.
"The raw beef, that one almost made me yak in the sink," Barrymore said. "It had a cream and it curdled. It was fake raw meat. It didn't taste very good. Weirdly, of all the things, the raw meat was one that got me. That was one that took me down and almost made me throw up."
According to a source in production, the raw beef was made of "a yucky pasta."