Forty years after its release, AND the extra-terrestrial, the four-Oscar film is reissued with a 45-minute bonus and on this occasion, the one who played the little boy protecting the extraterrestrial, actor Henry Thomas, finds himself promoting it, “again”, he tells Insider. The child-star is now 51 years old and explains who never stops trying to talk about something other than ET He was ten years old during the filming and this film marked his life.
Overnight, his daily life as a child changed, strangers started calling out to him everywhere, time and time again, he completely lost his anonymity at school, in the street, everywhere. Result: he never really saw the film again. The last time was twenty years ago, to celebrate, precisely, the twenty years of the release. But by his own admission, he did”did not look at the screen (…) Because, from 1982, everything was very hard for mehe confides to Insider magazine, especially as a teenager, when I tried to show that I was no longer ten years old, that I was an adult in the making, people always looked at me like little Eliott riding a bicycle.“
Professionally too, it will take him years to turn the ET page and star in other great films like Fall Legends with Brad Pitt or Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese. “I had to be an adulthe told CNN, to measure the upheaval that ET has been, the impact it has had on people“, its universal, intergenerational, timeless side. Henry Thomas also looks back on everything that has changed in 40 years. Mental health issues, for example, which no one thought they would address in 1982, unlike today where actors and actresses talk without taboo about the pressure they are under, the same goes for abusive behavior on film sets, towards women, towards child actors.
Henry Thomas cites the importance of the #MeeToo movement, but also the role of social networks, for better and sometimes for worse. In forty years, times have changed, but what has not aged a bit is the message of Steven Spielberg’s film, imperishable, current in 1982 as in 2022, “a message about compassionsummarizes Henry Thomas, the capacity to put oneself in the place of the other, of the stranger, of the strange, a capacity that deep down we all have within us.“