ET actor fought Steven Spielberg over ‘uncomfortable’ scene: ‘This was a family film’

Actor Dee Wallace, who played the mother of a young boy who befriends a space alien, recalled reaching a ‘compromise’ with the director on set over a scene she worried would disrupt the movie’s ‘purity’

The ET the Extra-Terrestrial star Dee Wallace has revealed that she fought director Steven Spielberg over a scene in the film she found “uncomfortable”, arguing that it would have spoiled the “purity” of the movie.

Wallace starred in the 1982 classic as the mother of a young boy who befriends a space alien he dubs “ET”. Henry Thomas played the boy in question, with a seven-year-old Drew Barrymore cast as his little sister.

In a new interview with the Still Here Hollywood podcast, Wallace recalled working on the film and struggling with a subplot in which the titular alien develops romantic feelings for her character.

“There’s a whole B story in ET about ET having a love affair with Mary, a love crush on Mary,” she explained. “And there’s little bits of it left in there. There was a scene where he came in to put Reese’s Pieces down on my bedside table as I’m asleep.”

While she had no problem with the scene as scripted, she remembered that it played slightly differently on set.

“Mr Spielberg wanted the sheet a little lower than I was comfortable with,” she said. “I argued my point that this was a family film that was very pure to me.”

Wallace then sought support from the film’s screenwriter Melissa Mathison and its producer Kathleen Kennedy, with all four parties coming to an agreement on how the scene would play out – with the sheet no longer pulled low on Wallace’s body.

“We compromised and pulled the sheet up almost to my shoulder blades, which I was okay with,” she said.

ET in Steven Spielberg’s ‘ET the Extra-Terrestrial’ (Universal/Everett/Shutterstock)

It likely didn’t bother Spielberg in the end, who said in 2023 that he believes ET is the only one of his films he considers “pretty perfect”.

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In January, Spielberg revealed that the studio behind ET desperately wanted to make a sequel to the film after witnessing it become the highest-grossing movie of all time (a record surpassed 11 years later by Spielberg’s Jurassic Park). It would have been set on ET’s home planet.

“I flirted with it for a little bit and the only thing I could think about was [adapting] a book [sequel] called The Green Planet, which was all going to take place on ET’s home,” he said. “We were all going to be able to go to ET’s home and see how ET lived. But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”