Actress Drew Barrymore asked Steven Spielberg to be her dad while they were filming E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Barrymore has been candid about her life growing up in the spotlight. When she was seven years old, she was cast in Spielberg’s science fiction classic, E.T. the Extraterrestrial. While on this set, Spielberg did everything he could to put her in a comfortable environment. When young Barrymore saw people operating the alien, Spielberg did not want to break the illusion. “So I simply said, ‘It’s okay, E.T. is so special E.T. has eight assistants. I am the director, I only have one,” Spielberg told in a Vulture profile.
Spielberg kept a few operators on hand so the alien could react to her. Drew Barrymore even asked Spielberg if he could be her dad. He said no, but agreed to be her godfather. “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,” he once said. “Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”
Barrymore and Spielberg remain close friends.
Where to watch The Drew Barrymore Show
The Drew Barrymore Show plays on TV on your local channels. It is streaming on Paramount+, and Season 1 is streaming on Pluto TV.
