She worked. The films of her early twenties were not, by the standards of the success she had achieved as a child, remarkable achievements. Poison Ivy (1992) was a low-budget thriller that performed modestly at the box office but found a sustained audience on home video and cable, the late-night movie landscape of the early 1990s that had a particular appetite for its combination of suburban menace and sexual tension. The critical response was largely dismissive. It was not the kind of film that restored reputations.
Guncrazy (1992) was different. It was a made-for-cable film based on the 1950 crime movie of the same name, and in it Drew Barrymore gave a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film. Critics who saw it were reminded that the child who had been so quietly and precisely affecting in E.T. was still there under the tabloid narrative. She had not lost the ability to inhabit a character and make an audience feel something. The nomination was, in retrospect, an early signal of what was coming.
The Amy Fisher Story (1993) and Bad Girls (1994) continued her working presence without significantly elevating her profile. She also made choices in her personal life during this period that generated tabloid coverage — her brief marriage to Jeremy Thomas in 1994, which lasted less than three months, and her appearance in Interview magazine and later Playboy, were the kind of events that added to a public image she would eventually need to work deliberately to reframe.