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.
When I saw the scene in 'Close Encounters,' and Richard Dreyfuss's son is screaming at him - that's a heartbreaking scene. And I remember being devastated by 'E.T.' Or when E.T. started to get sick. That broke me up a little bit.
I'd become a bit of a joke. People would make memes, chopping my head off in a group photo and putting a monster or ET on there. I'd be in live Q&As and these things would pop up and I'd have to just sit there.
It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.
In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.
Most of the people interviewing me are far more square than me. I think it's the ET thing. I'm sitting there, my hair is combed, and I'm in a suit.
I took the ET job because I wanted to stop traveling and they said I would only work half a day. Then I could work on music the rest of the day. They put in my contract that I wouldn't work after 1 P.M.
We knew that for E.T. to feel real, you had to have some connection to his eyes.
Calvin had finally taken a look at the ET tape, and he had reacted just as she had expected he would. He loved it; he loved me. Suddenly he was thinking of me for everything: underwear, jeans, suits, even the Escape fragrance campaign.
The first time I saw E.T., the actual image of an alien, and he was so sweet-looking. I wanted him. I wanted E.T.
