Then, in 1981, she auditioned for a small film being made by a director named Steven Spielberg. The film was about a boy who befriends an alien left behind on Earth. The role available for a seven-year-old girl was that of the boy’s younger sister.
The audition, in retrospect, revealed something essential about Drew Barrymore’s character as it had already formed by the age of seven. She arrived and told Spielberg, according to accounts she has given in interviews over the years, that she led a punk rock band. She described the band with convincing enthusiasm and detail. The band did not exist. Spielberg was charmed by a child who could spin an elaborate fiction with perfect commitment and recognized in that facility something useful for an actress — the ability to inhabit a narrative completely, to make the invented feel real.
He cast her as Gertie in what became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
The film was released on June 11, 1982. Drew was seven years old at the time of filming, turning eight in February of 1982. The film became one of the highest-grossing films in history. Gertie — small, fierce, emotionally immediate, capable of both comedy and genuine feeling — became one of its most memorable characters. Drew Barrymore became famous overnight at an age when most children are still learning to read chapter books with confidence.
What happened on the set of E.T., in Barrymore’s own recollection, offered both warmth and a hint of something more complicated. Spielberg, understanding that young Drew related to the E.T. puppet as if it were a living creature, kept the animatronic character “alive” and interactive with her even during lunch breaks, ensuring that her emotional responses in the film would be genuine rather than performed. Drew has said that she believed, on some level, that E.T. was real — that the creature she was interacting with was actually present in a way that went beyond the mechanics of a film set. She has also said, in various interviews, that she considered Spielberg a kind of father figure — that he represented a consistency and care that the actual adults in her life did not reliably provide.