Remember Little Elliott From E.T.? Here’s What Henry Thomas Looks Like 43 Years Later
There is a moment near the end of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when a ten-year-old boy puts his arms around a small brown alien and tells him he will always be right there — pointing to his own chest, meaning his heart — and every person who has ever seen it remembers exactly where they were when they first cried.
That boy was Henry Thomas, and what he did in that audition room before a single frame was ever shot is already one of the most legendary stories in Hollywood history.
What happened to him in the four decades since is something most fans would genuinely never guess.
He Walked Into That Audition Wearing an Indiana Jones Hat
Henry Jackson Thomas Jr. was born on September 9, 1971, in San Antonio, Texas, the son of a homemaker and a hydraulic machinist.
He decided he wanted to be an actor at age eight, after watching a PBS special on acting.
In 1981, he made his film debut in Raggedy Man, a quiet family drama starring Sissy Spacek, which put him on the radar of the right casting directors at exactly the right moment.
Steven Spielberg was looking for someone to play Elliott Taylor — the gentle, fatherless suburban boy who discovers a stranded alien in his backyard — and the first child they had selected for the role fell through.
A Dungeons & Dragons session during the audition process had revealed that the original choice was, by most accounts, a bit of a handful.
Thomas walked into the room wearing a bullwhip and an Indiana Jones hat because he was completely obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark — itself a Spielberg film that had opened just the year before.
Casting director Marci Liroff and Spielberg asked him to do an improvisation exercise.
The scenario: a government agent has come to take your best friend away, and you know you will never see him again.
Thomas drew on the real memory of his dog dying.
He began to cry — genuinely, completely, without any self-consciousness — pleading with an imaginary agent not to take his friend, voice cracking, every syllable soaked in real grief.
The audition tape exists, and it is extraordinary to watch even now.
When it was over, Steven Spielberg said four words out loud in the room: “OK, kid, you got the job.”
The Film That Became the Highest-Grossing Movie in History
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial opened on June 11, 1982, and the world responded in a way that no one — not even Spielberg — had fully anticipated.
The film spent 16 non-consecutive weeks at number one at the box office, a record that even Titanic never broke.
It surpassed Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film in history at the time, a position it held until 1993.
It received nine Academy Award nominations, winning four — though Best Picture was not among them, which remains one of the more baffling oversights in Oscar history.
Henry Thomas received a Golden Globe nomination, a BAFTA nomination, and a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actor — remarkable recognition for a ten-year-old carrying a major studio film on his shoulders.
He won the Young Artist Award for his performance.
The film’s emotional power rested almost entirely on the authenticity of his work — every scene he shared with E.T. required him to act opposite a rubber puppet and make audiences believe in a relationship as genuine as any they had ever seen between two humans.
He was ten years old, and earned $15,000 for the role.
The Weight of Overnight Global Fame
After E.T., Henry Thomas struggled with the kind of sudden, all-encompassing celebrity that very few children are equipped to navigate.
He was recognized everywhere.
His San Antonio classmates, who had not been able to fully process the difference between the actor and the character, treated him with a wariness that looked more like quiet exclusion than the admiration from afar that defined most people’s experience of his fame.
He handled it by staying largely in San Antonio, keeping his feet on Texas ground, and returning to something resembling a normal childhood in between film projects.
The work continued.
In 1984 he starred in Cloak & Dagger, a spy thriller for children shot in San Antonio — a clever piece of casting that kept him close to home.
He appeared in Milos Forman’s Valmont in 1989, opposite Colin Firth, demonstrating a range and composure that made experienced adult actors on set take notice.
In 1990 he brought unexpected depth to the role of a young Norman Bates in Psycho IV: The Beginning on Showtime — nobody’s idea of a safe or obvious career move.
The Mainstream Career He Built Scene by Scene
Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Henry Thomas built a steady, varied film career that belonged entirely to him — not to Elliott.
In 1994, he played the naive younger brother of Brad Pitt in Edward Zwick’s epic Legends of the Fall, holding the screen with Anthony Hopkins and Pitt without flinching.
He received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor — Series, Miniseries or Television Film for his work in Indictment: The McMartin Trial in 1997.
He appeared in the USA Network’s acclaimed Moby Dick (1998) as Ishmael, the sole survivor of Ahab’s obsession.
He played a role in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York in 2002, one of the most intensely contested productions of that era.
He appeared in All the Pretty Horses (2000) and 11:14 (2003), both of which demonstrated a performer who chose work for its quality rather than its profile.
He also spent part of the 1990s living a life that had nothing to do with Hollywood.
He played guitar and wrote songs for a San Antonio band called The Blue Heelers — named after the Australian cattle dog breed — recording a self-produced album called Twister.
In 1998, his song “Truckstop Coffee,” recorded with the Blue Heelers, appeared on the soundtrack for the film Niagara, Niagara.
He was, in other words, living exactly the life he wanted to live — close to his roots, near his family, making music, and taking acting roles that interested him rather than chasing the spotlight.
The Horror Renaissance That Made Him a Genre Icon
The most unexpected chapter of Henry Thomas’s career began in 2016, when filmmaker Mike Flanagan cast him in Ouija: Origin of Evil.
It was the start of a creative partnership that has become one of the most productive and critically celebrated director-actor relationships in modern horror.
Since 2016, Thomas has appeared in every major Flanagan project: Gerald’s Game (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019, in which he played a version of Jack Torrance), and then the Netflix series that redefined prestige horror television.
In The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Thomas played Hugh Crain — the loving, haunted patriarch of a family undone by a terrible house — across two timelines simultaneously, earning a Saturn Award for his performance.
The emotional depth he brought to the role reminded critics and viewers that this was the same person who had made Steven Spielberg cry in an audition room at age nine.
He went on to appear in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) — the latter as Frederick Usher, one of the central figures in Flanagan’s sweeping adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s work.
“It isn’t by choice so much as it is by happenstance, because of my collaboration with Mike Flanagan,” Thomas told ComingSoon.net.
“He’s hired me in everything he’s done since 2014, pretty much. So it’s been great collaborating with him.”
He has said he never expected to be considered a horror icon — and loves it.
The Reunion Nobody Expected but Everyone Needed
In November 2019, Henry Thomas did something that made several generations of moviegoers feel things they had not felt in decades.
He reprised the role of Elliott Taylor — now an adult, with a family of his own — in a four-minute short film produced as an Xfinity commercial.
E.T.: A Holiday Reunion reunites an adult Elliott with E.T., who returns for the holidays and experiences the modern world through the eyes of the alien who once needed a bicycle and a boy’s heart to find his way home.
Spielberg gave the project his blessing.
The moment the John Williams score plays while the screen is still dark, and you already know exactly what you’re about to feel — that reaction belongs entirely to what Henry Thomas built in 1982 with a rubber puppet and the memory of a dog he had lost.
What Henry Thomas Looks Like Now
Henry Thomas will be turning 55 in September 2026, and he looks like a man who has spent four decades choosing interesting work over famous work and has no obvious regrets about the trade.
He settled in Wilsonville, Oregon in 2014 and has built a quiet family life there.
He has three children: a daughter, Hazel, from his marriage to actress Marie Zielcke; and a son, Henry III, and daughter, Evelyn, with his wife Annalee Fery, to whom he has been married since 2009.
He remains active on the convention circuit — appearing at events including CreepyCon and the Hollywood Show — where he is equally beloved by the fans who grew up with E.T. and the newer generation who found him through the Flanagan universe.
He is, in any room he walks into, both Elliott and everything that came after.
What Henry Thomas Has Been Up to Since E.T.
Here is a look at his biggest milestones in the 43 years since the bicycle crossed the moon:
- 1982: Starred as Elliott Taylor in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at age ten, delivering a performance of such emotional authenticity that it earned him a Golden Globe nomination, a BAFTA nomination, a Saturn Award nomination, and a Young Artist Award — one of the most decorated performances by a child actor in the history of American cinema.
- 1984: Starred in Cloak & Dagger, a spy thriller for children shot in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas — a deliberate choice to stay close to his roots and continue developing as an actor without the pressure of Hollywood’s full machinery around him.
- 1989: Appeared in Milos Forman’s Valmont opposite Colin Firth, marking himself as a young adult actor capable of holding his own in literary period drama alongside classically trained European theater talent.
- 1994: Played the naïve younger brother of Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, alongside Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn, in one of the more visually sweeping Hollywood productions of the decade — a role that established him as a serious adult performer.
- 1997: Received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Indictment: The McMartin Trial — recognition that his post-E.T. career had produced work worthy of the industry’s top awards, not merely its nostalgia.
- 1990s: Played guitar and wrote songs for The Blue Heelers, a San Antonio band that self-produced an album called Twister and placed a track on a film soundtrack — a creative life running entirely parallel to his acting career and entirely on his own terms.
- 2002: Appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, one of the most ambitious and contested productions of the early 2000s, alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cameron Diaz.
- 2016–present: Began his partnership with filmmaker Mike Flanagan, appearing in every major Flanagan project through The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) and winning a Saturn Award for his emotionally devastating performance as Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House — a second career chapter that rivals the first in its ambition.
- 2019: Reprised the role of Elliott Taylor in E.T.: A Holiday Reunion, a four-minute Xfinity film made with Spielberg’s blessing, in which a now-adult Elliott receives an unexpected visitor — a reunion that reminded the world, with striking efficiency, exactly why the original film still makes people cry.
- Present: Living in Wilsonville, Oregon with his family, continuing to act in independent films and convention appearances, and remaining — to the fans who grew up with that bicycle silhouette against the moon — one of the most beloved figures in the history of American cinema.
Here’s What Other Famous Stars Look Like Now
Check out our other articles about the famous movie stars, TV stars and musicians from yesteryear that you know and love.
- Marcia from The Brady Bunch — Maureen McCormick
- Jan from The Brady Bunch — Eve Plumb
- Wonder Woman — Lynda Carter
- Mindy From Mork & Mindy — Pam Dawber
- Chachi from Happy Days — Scott Baio
- Alex from Flashdance — Jennifer Beals
- Linda from Fast Times at Ridgemont High — Phoebe Cates
- Fran Fine from The Nanny — Fran Drescher
- Denise Huxtable from The Cosby Show — Lisa Bonet
- Regan from The Exorcist — Linda Blair
- Remember the Little Boy From The Sixth Sense — Haley Joel Osment