‘E.T.’ Star Dee Wallace Wanted to Tone Down Film’s Bedroom Scene: ‘This Was a Family Film’

The 1982 classic film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial could have gone a very different way — at least, that’s what the movie’s star Dee Wallace is revealing.

“[Originally, there was] a whole B-story in E.T. about E.T. having a love affair with Mary — a love ‘crush’ on Mary,” Wallace told Steve Kmetko on the Monday, April 28, episode of his “Still Here Hollywood” podcast.

“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,” she added.“Well, Mr. Spielberg wanted the sheet a little lower than I was comfortable with.”

Wallace said she had to stand her ground and eventually brought in others to help argue her point.

“I argued my point that this was a family film. I could understand the parents smoking pot in Poltergeist,” she continued. “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.”

The actress also included another tidbit about filming the movie — she improvised the scene where her character finds out her ex-husband is traveling to Mexico with a new girlfriend.

“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.’”

During an appearance at New York City’s TCM Film Festival on January 25, Spielberg revealed he first realized he wanted to be a parent while filming the iconic movie.

“Up until that point … I was just making movies,” Spielberg, 78, said during a panel at the festival moderated by Dave Karger, per People. “That was my life. I was obsessed with telling stories, but making E.T. made me want to be a father for the first time. I never even thought about that until E.T.”

At the same event, Drew Barrymore — who starred in the film when she was just 7 years old — also shared, “I think E.T., for me, is the [film] I’m the most proud of because it’s the one that changed my life.”