Drew Barrymore and Christian Bale both came into show business as children and found fame young. They could have also been a buzzy teen couple at one time—if Barrymore hadn't completely ghosted Bale after just one date. Read on to find out how they met as child actors, what they did on their singular date, why Barrymore never called the Batman Begins star again, and what each of them have said about their failed romance in the years since.
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Bale and Barrymore were both child stars.
Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesAfter a small part in the 1980 sci-fi horror film Altered States, Barrymore achieved breakthrough success with her second film, Steven Spielberg’sE.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which she made when she was only seven years old. Bale starred in a Spielberg movie himself at 13, when he played an English boy separated from his parents in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II in 1987's Empire of the Sun.
How, exactly, Bale and Barrymore got to know each other is a mystery, but they were both promising young actors who had each worked with Spielberg and were coming up in Hollywood at the same time. It’s not a surprise that they crossed paths.
“He’s so cute!” Barrymore recalled in a 2009 interview in People, as reported by the Irish Examiner. “And I knew him when he was a kid. He was in Empire of The Sun.”
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They went on one date when they were teenagers.
Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesIn 2012, Bale revealed that he’d gone on a date with Barrymore when he was 13 and she was 12. They saw a movie together, but there would be no second date.
“We went to see some bloody awful horror film, and that was the end of it,” the now-50-year-old star told GQ Australia. “She never called again,”
Barrymore explained herself years later.
What went wrong on the date? Nothing in particular, according to Barrymore, who was asked about their short-lived flirtation during a 2015 appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
“I don’t know! He was so nice,” she said when questioned why she never called the future Bruce Wayne again. “I wasn’t like, super boy crazy. I had a lot of fish to fry. I had big problems in my world for many years—like, in good ways—things you gotta overcome. Boys [were] like very secondary.”
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They both got married and had children.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagicWhile the tabloids never got the use the celebrity couple name “Baleymore,” both Bale and Barrymore went on to get married and have children. Bale married Sibi Blažić in 2000, and the couple have two children together. Barrymore has been married three times: first, to Jeremy Thomas in 1994, though they split after 19 days and finalized the divorce by the next year; then to comedian Tom Green from 2000 to 2001; and finally to Will Kopelman in 2012. Barrymore and Kopelman have two children together, and they split in 2016.
"I would maybe live with someone again, maybe, but I've had kids and there's no way, I will never, ever, ever, get married again," she said on her daytime show in 2022, as reported by People.
