“I Thought I Blew It”: Henry Thomas on the Audition, Trauma and Movie Magic Behind ‘E.T.’

Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Before E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial became the most beloved alien movie ever made — before it dethroned Star Wars at the box office, before kids everywhere pointed glowing fingers at each other in suburban backyards — Henry Thomas thought he’d already lost the part. “I felt like I had done the worst job possible,” Thomas says on The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast . “I thought I blew it the minute I opened my mouth.” What happened next is now the stuff of Hollywood legend. Steven Spielberg , unsatisfied with the scripted read, pivoted. Forget the sides, he said. He gave the 10-year-old actor a scenario: Your best friend is being taken away. And so Thomas didn’t act — he remembered. Related Stories Movies Drew Goddard Knew There Was Only Ever the Pricey Version of 'Project Hail Mary' Movies Why 1983's Apocalypse Film 'Testament' Feels Timelier Than Ever: "The Terror Now Is That We Will Attack" He thought about his dog — killed by a neighbor’s dog in front of him as a child — and collapsed into something raw enough to make Spielberg cry. “That’s what you see,” he says now. “I just plugged into that.” Spielberg didn’t hesitate: “OK, kid, you got the job,” he said, casting Thomas as Elliott, the suburban child hero of the film. The performance that followed would define a generation. But at the time, almost no one — not even the — believed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would be a hit. “It was kind of like, ‘Go off and do this little movie,'” Thomas recalls. The prevailing wisdom, shaped by Alien , was that audiences wanted monsters, not something gentle and homesick. “They assumed the mean alien would do better,” Thomas explains, referring to John Carpenter’s much-anticipated The Thing , released two weeks after E.T. on June 2...