11-05-2025
'E.T. 'star Dee Wallace wanted to tone down sexiness in bedroom scene with her and the titular alien
Dee Wallace liked E.T., but just not in that way.
The actress best known for playing the divorced mom of three in Steven Spielberg's science-fiction classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial spoke to the golden-toned Steve Kmetko on his Still Here Hollywood podcast, and shared a candy-coated morsel from the set of what still ranks as one of the top 10 grossing movies of all time (when adjusted for inflation.)
Wallace has fond memories of the shoot, but revealed the one time she and the now Oscar-winning director parted company creatively.
"[Originally, there was] a whole B-story in E.T. about E.T. having a love affair with Mary — a love 'crush' on Mary," she recalled. "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. Well, Mr. Spielberg wanted the sheet a little lower than I was comfortable with."
She continued, "I argued my point that this was a family film. I could understand the parents smoking pot in Poltergeist," she added, referencing the film that Spielberg had made at around the same time as a very active producer. "But this film was very pure to me. And it was about love. And so we ended up calling in [producer] Kathleen Kennedy and [writer] Melissa [Mathison], our beautiful, amazing writer, and they said, 'We kind of agree with her, Steven.'
"So we compromised," Wallace concluded, "and pulled the sheet up almost to my shoulder blades, which I was okay with."
"That's pretty high," Kmetko offered, but Wallace retorted, "Not to a girl from Kansas!"
Earlier in Wallace's career, she did have a somewhat racy scene opposite Dudley Moore in Blake Edwards' comedy 10, which is probably okay for you to watch at work.
Wallace also shared another moment from E.T. where her instincts were met not with pushback from Spielberg, but with action.
In the scene where she learns that her ex-husband is away in Mexico with his new girlfriend, she decided to get up from the dining room table, so that her children wouldn't see her tears. The only problem was that it wasn't in the script.
"Steven came over to me and said, 'Dee, why did you get up and leave? It's not in the script.' And I explained to him what happened. And he looked at me, and turned around at the crew and said, 'You've got a half an hour, build me a wall here with a sink with running water. Thirty minutes.' So, of course, boom, boom, boom, it happened. [Now] he could take me over to the sink and bring me back into that big close-up where I say, 'He hates Mexico.'"
Check out more from Dee Wallace's appearance on Still Here Hollywood below.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
