Drew Barrymore thought ET was a real alien, says Steven Spielberg

Director Steven Spielberg drew a convincing performance from six-year-old Drew Barrymore by not revealing the alien was a puppet.

Drew Barrymore, aged six, with the puppet ET. Picture: News Ltd

Steven Spielberg put a great deal of work into making ET the Extra-Terrestrial as believable as possible so audiences would fall in love with the homesick alien.

The automated puppet was considered an engineering wonder at the time. Carlo Rambaldi, the Italian special effects artist, shared the Academy Award in visual effects for his work on the film. Few realised, however, that those efforts to keep alive the cinematic magic extended to the six-year-old star, Drew Barrymore, who believed ET really was from another planet.

Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas playing Gertie and Elliott in a scene from film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

Spielberg has now disclosed how he kept ET’s operators close by at all times so the alien could react to Barrymore, who would have lunch with and confide in the creature. The illusion was almost broken when Barrymore saw men operating ET from behind a wall and told Spielberg to kick them out.

“I didn’t want to burst the bubble,” the director told Vulture, the entertainment website. “So I simply said, ‘It’s OK, ET is so special ET has eight assistants. I am the director, I only have one.’ ”

Spielberg shot the film in strict continuity, with the scenes in chronological order, so as not to give the game away.

ET the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982 and became one of the biggest films of the decade. It tells the story of Elliott, a boy in California who befriends an alien stranded on Earth who must find a way to return home. Barrymore played the role of Gertie, Elliott’s mischievous sister.

Barrymore, 48, has spoken about how she believed her co-star was a real alien. During an episode of The Drew Barrymore Show last year she marked the film’s 40th anniversary.

Barrymore, with Steven Spielberg in 1999, has described him as the only parental figure in her life. Picture: Berliner Studio/Beimages/Shutterstock/The Times

“I really loved him in such a profound way,” she said. “I would go and take lunch to him.”

Henry Thomas, who played Elliott, recalled how Barrymore cared for their co-star. “We were on stage and it was quite cold,” he said. “You asked the wardrobe lady if you could have a scarf for ET’s neck because he was gonna get cold, so you wrapped the scarf around his neck.”

Dee Wallace, who played the family matriarch, echoed Spielberg’s story about the operators being ready at all times to maintain the illusion. She told Barrymore: “We found you over there just talking away to ET and so we let director Steven know.

“And so Steven, from that time on, appointed two guys to keep ET alive so whenever you came over to talk to him, he could react to you.”

Spielberg became a father figure for Barrymore, whose life spun out of control after the film. Though she was one of the Barrymore acting dynasty, her father, John Drew Barrymore, was an abusive alcoholic.

Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore and Robert MacNaughton.

The child actor asked Spielberg if he would be her father – he said no but agreed to be her godfather. She stayed with him on weekends.

He gave her a cat she named Gertie, after her character in the film. Vulture reported that she would take her to Disneyland.

Once, when Barrymore walked on to the set wearing red lipstick, Spielberg told her to remove it. He has said: “She was staying up way past her bedtime, going to places she should have only been hearing about and living a life at a very tender age that I think robbed her of her childhood. Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”

Barrymore started smoking marijuana when she was 10 years old and snorted cocaine two years later. At the age of 13 she went into a rehabilitation clinic. Yet she has since had a successful career in Hollywood, starring in films including Never Been Kissed, 50 First Dates and Donnie Darko.

Barrymore has been married three times. Her first marriage, to a Welsh-born Los Angeles bar owner in 1994, lasted two months before she filed for divorce.

She was married to Tom Green, the comedian, for a year from 2001 before tying the knot in 2012 with Will Kopelman, an art consultant, with whom she has two children, Olive, ten, and Frankie, nine. They divorced in 2016.

She still remains close to Spielberg, saying that he was “the only person in my life to this day that ever was a parental figure”.

She has a complicated relationship with her mother, Jaid Barrymore, however. She told Vulture she still financially supported her mother. In a video on Instagram she later clarified her comments to the website, denying that she said that she wished her mother was dead. She said that their relationship had improved.

She added: “I have been vulnerable and tried to figure out a very difficult, painful relationship while admitting it is difficult to do while a parent is alive.”

The Times