It doesn’t have to be easy being a child actor and starting out with an epic bombshell: ‘ET the extraterrestrial’ marked the beginning of two kids whose careers could not have been more uneven: Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas. We all know the problems that the first one had with the use of substances that accompanied a successful career, but, although many of you will know it, it is worth taking a look at what, in parallel, was happening to him. And it is that, what happened to henry thomas?
Your house, phone
Henry Jackson Thomas Jr was born on September 9, 1971. (I’ll spare you the math: he’s just turned fifty) Son of a housewife and a hydraulic machinist. He grew up on the outskirts of San Antonio (Texas) and it was there that watching PBS, the American public channel, changed his life at the age of eight and he decided what he wanted to do for the rest of his life: it was a special about being an actor. Two years later, at an open casting call at a San Antonio hotel, he landed his first role in a movie alongside Sissy Spacek.
‘The beggar’ was a tremendous failure, but it did not prevent the following year met in a casting a director who had just chained success after success: ‘Jaws’, ‘Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark’, ‘Encounters in the Third Kind’… And now, this director asked him to show sadness to land the lead role in his new film. Thomas thought about the death of his dog and even Steven Spielberg himself ended up crying that day. It was the beginning of ‘ET the extraterrestrial’.
Thomas had a hard time looking the doll in the eye because they were so far apart and he had to repeat the kiss scene four times because he got nervous having to do it with someone two years older than him, but none of this prevented him from becoming the Hollywood toy of the moment: ‘ET’ raised almost 80 times what it cost and everyone wanted to work with him. new child actor But we all know that Hollywood toys inevitably end up breaking.
Henry, take
Ever since ‘E.T’, Thomas had a problem choosing his roles. ‘Misunderstood’ (which in the Spanish picaresque became ‘Elliot’, despite the fact that no character was called that!) was a flop, and that was the trend in the 80s: ‘Frog Dreaming’, ‘Valmont’, ‘Fire in the sky’… Nothing was able to come back at the box office. Little by little, the adorable Elliot was lost in the collective memory, but the actor was so sure of what he was doing that he did not hesitate to drop out of college after just one year.
A career in philosophy and history didn’t fulfill him as much as acting full-time., so he decided to dedicate all his effort to what made him happy. And the results were… well, mixed. She was lucky that films like ‘Fever’ were shown at the Cannes festival and even He was nominated for the Golden Globes for the series ‘Indictment: the McMartin trial’ in 1996, but the tonic was chaining failures because of films like ‘All the pretty horses’ or ‘Niagara, Niagara’, in which he also put the soundtrack.
And it is that Henry Thomas did not put all the eggs in the same basket. He also composes music and, in fact, in ‘Honey Baby’, by Mika Kaurismaki (Aki’s older brother) he was able to collaborate on the soundtrack composing with Nikki Sudden, who sadly passed away shortly after, without giving them time to compose an album. Kaurismaki is very important in his life: He was the one who introduced him to Marie Zielcke, his partner at the time (a real German star) and became the godfather of his daughter Hazel. He got divorced in 2007, by the way, but don’t worry about him: he’s already married to another girl named Annalee, with whom he has two more children.
scare or death
Henry Thomas’ working life never made it to series B: his appearances in films, even if they were unsuccessful, were constant, and he even rubbed shoulders with directors like Martin Scorsese, who signed him for a supporting role in ‘Gangs of New York’, or Lasse Hallström, with whom he shared ‘Dear John’. And suddenly terror came.
There is nothing special about the way Henry Thomas met the person who was to change his working life: He and Mike Flanagan greeted each other at a meeting preparing the prequel to ‘Ouija’, which ended up being a blockbuster at the box office. Since then, Flanagan has counted on him on all of his projects in stellar supporting roles that have brought him back to life and taken away the label of “the kid from ET”. ‘Doctor Sleep’, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, ‘Midnight Mass’… The wheel has turned again for Thomas.
It is not that he denies the role that gave him fame, far from it: In 2019, the actor had an emotional reunion with ET in an ad for Xfinity. Since then, he has moved to Wilsonville, a small Oregon town of about 25,000 people, and his phone hasn’t stopped ringing: he will star in his own horror movie soon, ‘Crawlspace’, and will appear, of course, in ‘The Fall of the House Usher’. Not all fail-and-comeback stories are grandiose epics with big scandals to tell. To the quiet No hurries. He will be there… Always.