If you’re ever in need of wonder or a cathartic cry, or perhaps want to feel a little humbled, go watch Henry Thomas’s audition for ET. Just nine years old, he sits attentively, his little mousey face keen as an adult explains the improvised scene. “They’ve come with a search warrant and they want to take the creature away,” the man rattles off at a breakneck speed, and then action! In less than a minute, hot tears are rolling down Thomas’ face, for a puppet alien he hasn’t even seen. (Later, he’d reveal he was thinking of his dead dog.) “You can’t take him away, he’s mine,” Thomas says, bottom lip wobbling. “I don’t care what the president says, he’s my best friend and you can’t take him away.”
The people in the room at the time have said they all began to cry, too; you can hear a tinge of genuine alarm, and awe, in Steven Spielberg’s voice when he says, off-camera, “OK kid, you got the job.”
If anything, it is worth watching to see Thomas’s little smile.
After ET came out in 1982, life was never the same for Thomas, who had only appeared in one film before being cast in Spielberg’s smash hit. Now 51, he recalls a six-year-old Drew Barrymore tottering over to him on set to ask how many films he had been in. “Oh, you poor thing,” she answered airily. “I’ve been in four.” But aside from reading lines and knowing his cue, the little boy from rural Texas didn’t really know what acting was, let alone fame.
“It was a total unexpected side-effect of doing this fun thing I had wanted to do,” he says now, from his home in Oregon. “I had no clue that my life would change in any way. I worked on this movie, then I’m back on the farm, I’m back at school – but now people are pointing at me in the street.”
Even as a child he was aware that his mother, Carolyn, resented how his fame was impacting the whole family. She would take him to auditions and shoots until his late teens, and always felt the need to protect him. “She was doing the best job that she knew how to do,” he says. “My whole family weren’t really well equipped to deal with anything like that. And other than a few precautions, we didn’t change our lives that much. Consequently, we got a lot of weird visitors to our residence and things like that, phone calls.”
Complete strangers would want to speak to a little boy? He nods. “We had to call the authorities a few times. ET was a real sensation, some people were fanatical about it.”
Former child actors are often asked: would you let your children act? Thomas, who has three children, has given varying answers over the years but he’s resolute when I ask. “Pursue it when you’re older,” he says. “I still don’t think it’s a great way to grow up. It was exciting for me, I went to some strange locales and met some interesting people.
“But it was also very disruptive to my parents’ marriage. Our social life got weird. You get famous and suddenly every cousin that you never knew looks you up. People are strange, they do weird stuff. As a kid, that’s a lot to deal with. And when you’re an adult [too], but at least then you have all of the faculties, hopefully, to deal with fame.”
Thomas, who grew up in a small town near San Antonio, initially saw acting as a way of avoiding piano lessons. The first time he stood on a stage, he says, “I pissed my pants”; while waiting in the wings as his pants dried, he suddenly decided he’d like another go. After ET, Thomas was in huge demand and appeared in a few family adventure films – but he also felt an “enormous pressure” to stay at home, to preserve normality. “I tried seclusion but I gave up on it because it is so much work and it seems like you’re creating an aura of intrigue around you, which causes even more problems. Now, I don’t even try. I just hide right out in the open.”
Thomas’s talents never disappeared: as he aged, he was rarely the leading man but always excellent in supporting roles, in films including Legends of the Fall, Gangs of New York and Suicide Kings. But he felt some people still saw him as a small boy. He almost stopped acting in the late 2000s, when times got particularly tough.
“The last writers’ strike coincided with a mortgage crisis – it was pretty bleak in terms of opportunity,” he says. “I had three small children and I was the sole provider. My money was all from acting hoo-ha – I’ve never really been very much of a businessman, I’ve stumbled along in terms of fortune. So I was really thinking of getting out of LA to start a farm and raise my kids there. I had to do something.”
Then the US director Mike Flanagan asked for a meeting. Their first collaboration – Ouija: Origin of Evil, a prequel to a successful horror film – resulted in a professional relationship that now spans eight films and TV shows. Thomas took over for Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in Doctor Sleep, Flanagan’s sequel to The Shining; he has played a British toff in The Haunting of Bly Manor, Flanagan’s take on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw; even a ghostly hitchhiker in the spooky teen drama The Midnight Club.
Mostly, Flanagan has cast Thomas as fathers, an interesting development for a man who is perfectly preserved as a child in the minds of many. “I’m basically playing Mike’s dad with a different accent,” he says, of his performance as a downtrodden fisher in Flanagan’s horror series Midnight Mass. “He’s cast me in that role a few times.”
Thomas is now part of what the internet has dubbed “the Flanafam” – a troupe of actors who appear in all Flanagan’s works – and these days he’s as likely to be recognised for that work as for ET. “Some young people only know me from The Haunting of Hill House and they’re amazed that I was the kid from ET, that movie their grandmother made them watch on VHS,” he says, laughing. “But the ET fans range in age from five to 85. And for so many people, it was the first film they saw in theatres – I get told that a lot.”
Strangers still want to talk to him about ET but he’s just fine with that now: about four years ago he started to attend fan conventions for the first time. He once thought they were “fleecing people” but had a change of heart when he realised how happy it made people to share their ET memories with him. He’s about to head to Australia for one with the actor Dee Wallace, who played Elliott’s mother. “Dee is like my real mum now because we see each other so much,” he says fondly. “She’s incredible, she’ll email me going, ‘I’ve got the script that this guy sent me and I’m doing this job next week … ’ I don’t even know how old Dee is, but she is a lot busier than I am.”
Growing older has helped him gain a more positive perspective on his career, he thinks. “Throughout much of my youth I had a chip on my shoulder about the idea that my only accomplishments were when I was a boy,” he says. “As I got a bit older, in my 20s especially, I was eager to prove I was a real actor, I wasn’t just some lucky kid. I had a stubborn idea that I was only going to exist through my art alone.
“But then you get humbled enough, or you have enough success, or a mixture thereof, and you start to see it as what it is – which is just sheer terror, abstract opinion and luck, with a smidgen of talent thrown in just for kicks,” he adds, smiling. “I know now this doesn’t happen to everyone. We had a success that has lasted generations. ET is being passed along as a classic now, in the way that The Wizard of Oz was when I was a kid. That’s a very special thing to be part of.”
Henry Thomas is appearing at Metro Comic Con in Melbourne, 8-9 July. His next show with Flanagan, The Fall of the House of Usher, starts on Netflix this year
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