- Steven Spielberg has said in multiple interviews that working with Drew Barrymore inspired him to be a father.
- Barrymore responded on “The Late Show,” saying she was “relieved” to be his “training wheels” for parenthood.
- Spielberg later raised seven children, including two stepchildren.
Drew Barrymore called Steven Spielberg a “big father figure” in her life after he said in a recent interview that working with the actor on “E.T.” inspired him to be a parent.
During a panel on Saturday at the TCM Classic Film Festival in New York City, Spielberg said directing Barrymore and the other child actors on the 1982 film “changed his life,” People reported.
“I was obsessed with telling stories, but making ‘E.T.’ made me want to be a father for the first time. I never even thought about that until ‘E.T,'” Spielberg said.
He made a similar comment on another panel at the same festival in 2022.
Reacting to the comments on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Barrymore said she was relieved she didn’t put Spielberg off being a parent.
“He always called me his training wheels for parenthood,” Barrymore said. “I spent so much time with him, and he really took me under his wing.”
“E.T.” was Spielberg’s first encounter with Barrymore, who was six at the time of filming. It became her big break in Hollywood.
Barrymore recalled Spielberg persuading her not to get her ears pierced until she was 10 and spending time with him off set.
“He was someone who was there and who I believed in, and I could call, and I would spend weekends at his house, and he was always showing movies,” Barrymore said. “He was such a good father figure. I knew he was going to be the best father.”
Spielberg now has seven children and six grandchildren.
Spielberg shares his first child, Max, born in 1985, with his ex-wife Amy Irving. After their divorce in 1989, he married Kate Capshaw in 1991, who already had two children, Theo, who was adopted, and Jessica, whom Capshaw shares with her ex-husband Robert Capshaw.
Capshaw and Spielberg had three more children together and adopted another child.
In 2023, Vulture reported that Barrymore once asked Spielberg to be her dad after bonding with him on the set of “E.T.” Spielberg declined but accepted a role as her godfather.
Spielberg told the outlet he worried about Barrymore believing she was being “robbed of her childhood.”
“Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her,” he said.
Barrymore, who now has two children of her own, has publicly spoken about her troubled childhood, saying that her father was abusive before abandoning the family and her mother took her to inappropriate parties while she was a child.
Barrymore emancipated herself from her parents at 14, after her mother forced her to go to a mental health institution for 18 months after the actor developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Barrymore said on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” in 2021 that cutting her mother out of her life was “the worst pain I’ve ever known,” but they have since reconciled.
“I feel goodness toward my mom. I feel empathy and understanding,” Barrymore said.
