Henry Thomas

“I think it's great when girls are artistic.”

“Carloads of tourists would photograph the family mailbox, and there was weird mail, death threats.”

“It was like that for the first six months after 'E.T.' was in cinemas. I'd go out and get mobbed. I was a shy kid, and being approached by adults all the time just freaked me out.”

“My son, who is 7, he passed a car in a parking lot that was probably a 1998 model, and he said, 'Wow, Dad, look at that old car.' I was looking around for an old car, and I realized that my old car maybe stops at 1965.”

“The hardest thing about being a kid actor is just kind of separating 'this is my professional life' and 'this is my kid life.' That was always the hard part for me.”

“I was getting a lot of hassles from the public. Everybody recognized me.”

“I would inevitably get the girls who were interested in me because I was the guy from E.T. It was kind of tough. I can't deny ever capitalizing upon it but on the whole in my teens I was pretty virtuous.”

“The idea of a film staying in theaters for a year is something of a fantasy today.”

“I remember, when I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, the '50s were really cool. And then the '60s were really cool. And then the '70s.”

“The one thing I've always done is to try not to overcomplicate anything.”

“I understood why films were made, and if they made a lot of money, they were successful. All of these things I knew. As a ten-year-old boy, I didn't really think a lot about finances or celebrity. I always viewed films as kind of what I imagined a summer camp to be like.”

“Mike Flanagan wants to work with me again, and I would love to work with him again.”

“I was highly sensitive and still am, but as a kid I could tap into my emotional state rather easily.”

“I got so tired of everybody talking about 'Stranger Things,' I think I developed a mental block against watching it.”

“My dad's family comes from the North, and my mother's family comes from somewhere around Carmarthenshire.”

“Even if I had a tuxedo I wouldn't wear it to school.”

“It's harder to laugh than to cry.”

“Of course there have been times I regretted being the kid in 'E.T.' My world went completely crazy. I was that stupid kind of famous, where you can't go anywhere.”

“Whenever I have an opportunity, I catch a train and go to Wales and hire a car and drive around.”

“I figured out that I could think of my childhood dog that had died, and I could bring myself to tears. So I used that poor dead dog for several years until it just didn't work anymore, and I had to find something else.”