Valerie Bertinelli dropped a genuinely surprising piece of personal history on The Drew Barrymore Show and it left Drew Barrymore visibly stunned: Bertinelli said she briefly dated Steven Spielberg.
The reveal came during the show’s “Memory Bank” segment, when Bertinelli casually mentioned that she and Spielberg were together for “three, four months” before she met her first husband, Eddie Van Halen.
Barrymore’s reaction (“Steven Spielberg?! … WHAT?!”) hit harder because of her own long-running connection to the director. Barrymore has spoken over the years about how close she felt to Spielberg after E.T., so hearing the news framed as a friend-to-friend confession made it even more of a jaw-dropper in the moment.
Bertinelli also added a few details that made the story feel real rather than like a throwaway anecdote. She said the relationship started after she went up to read for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Spielberg asked her out. She even brought in a black-and-white photo of the two together at the Oscars to back up the timeline.
And because it’s Bertinelli, she didn’t leave it there. She joked that Spielberg still has a bowling shirt of hers, essentially using daytime TV to ask for it back decades later.
The conversation landed as light, funny nostalgia, but it also fit into a larger theme Bertinelli has been open about lately: how unusual her dating life has been, since she married young and spent much of adulthood in long relationships. This Spielberg chapter, she framed it as brief — a “New York minute” — but still a memorable moment from that early period of her career and life.
