Dee Wallace opened up on the Still Here Hollywood Podcast about working with a 6-year-old Drew Barrymore on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Wallace said she knew from “day one” that Barrymore was going to be a producer and director
Wallace explained how director Steven Spielberg kept things unrehearsed on set in order for the child stars to feel more open and comfortable
Dee Wallace had an up-close seat to Drew Barrymore’s very early career, and she knew the child star was special even then.
Wallace, 76, talked about her time filming 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on the April 28 episode of the Still Here Hollywood Podcast with Steve Kmetko. Barrymore, now, 50, was just 6 years old when she filmed the movie. Wallace played Mary, the mother of Barrymore’s Gertie, Robert MacNaughton’s Michael and Henry Thomas’s Elliott, who finds the alien E.T. and protects him in their home.
Wallace said of Barrymore on the podcast, “That kid, we knew from day one she was going to be a producer and director.”
She remembered the exact moment, explaining, “I’m sitting in a high director’s chair, first day on set, and she comes up to me and she goes, ‘Hi Dee, I’m going to sit in your lap now.’ And I said, ‘Okay, Drew, come on up.’ She just knew what she wanted, that one.”
Related: Drew Barrymore Remembers E.T. As Her ‘First Imaginary Friend’ 40 Years After Iconic Film (Exclusive)
In addition to her eponymous talk show The Drew Barrymore Show, Barrymore produced her movies Fever Pitch and How to Be Single and her series Santa Clarita Diet. In 2009, she directed Whip It.
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The cast of ‘E.T.’ in 2002 with director Steven Spielberg. From left: Robert MacNaughton, Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Drew Barrymore and Peter Coyote
Wallace remembered how E.T.’s director, Steven Spielberg, wanted the child actors to be “fresh and in the moment,” and eschewed rehearsals, which is also the way she prefers to work.
“You can’t rehearse and overwork kids because kids live in the moment,” she said. “And if you keep trying to get them to do the same thing over and over again, it gets old. And you can tell they’re acting. I can tell the first time a kid says a line in a scene if their mother rehearsed it with them … Mothers say it very different than kids say it.” She also remembered that some of the toys in the kids’ room were the child actors’ actual toys from home, so that they could “relate to them in a personal way.”
Wallace said that after she read the screenplay for E.T., she knew she wanted to do it, even though she knew her part was not large. She told her agent, “I don’t know how much this is going to do for me, but I think it’s going to do a lot for the world. And I want to be a part of it.”
Related: Steven Spielberg on How ‘E.T.’ Was Inspired by His Parents’ Divorce: ‘We All Take Care of Each Other’
Wallace said she’s still in contact with the kids. Wallace appeared on Barrymore’s talk show in 2022, alongside Thomas and MacNaughton. Of E.T., Wallace said on the podcast, “That film reaches into your soul, into your heart. It surpasses some block that we have and wakes us up.”
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During a January panel in honor of the film, Spielberg, 78, similarly remembered young Barrymore as especially tenacious on set. “Drew made up a lot of her own dialogue because she was irrepressible,” he explained. He called Barrymore’s improvisations “gold,” and noted many of them made it into the final film.
Upon its release, E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time, a record that Spielberg himself broke 11 years later with Jurassic Park.
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