Colin Farrell Is a Huge Fan of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

The cast and crew of The Batman have gone out of their way to explain that they aren’t part of any shared DC Universe, but there’s another blockbuster that was…kind of surprising…to see come up during the promotional tour for the film: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Appearing on Hot Ones — the show where celebrities eat hot wings while answering questions — Colin Farrell discussed his love for the movie, and the way Henry Thomas’s performance helped give a young Farrell the idea that he wanted to pursue acting in the first place.

He likely isn’t alone: the movie was one of the highest-grossing films of all time when it was produced, and has been a staple of family film libraries ever since. There was even a time when a sequel was in the works, although the less said about that, the better.

“What I thought was remarkable at first when I saw it was E.T., and the excitement of that creature coming from a distant plane, and I would still find that remarkable today,” Farrell explained. “But what I find more remarkable about it now is what a story it is about broken families. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg has made some of the most, as far as I’m concerned, entertaining films in the history of cinema. But even when they’re entertaining, at the core, there’s some kind of emotional and psychological fracture going on. The family in E.T. is in trouble. The feds walking through the forest, and the keys are rattling — the keys haunted me, every time I heard keys rattling as a child. And magic. When they take off for the first time in that forest and they start flying…I got goosebumps. I got teary-eyed on the couch this Christmas, but that’s me [thinking about] my mortality and stuff, I’m sure of it. You know, nostalgia and melancholy. But, you know. So many reasons why it’s a great film.”

E.T. never got a sequel, but it spawned dozens of imitators, and left marks both obvious and not-so-obvious on popular culture. In 2014, X2: X-Men United writer Zak Penn directed a documentary galled Atari: Game Over, which chronicled his search for a huge cache of trashed E.T. Atari games. The games had been a subject of urban myth for years, and Penn’s film dug into the truth about the rumor, and its broader ties to the history (and fall) of the video game giant.

The 2017 DC’s Legends of Tomorrow episode “Phone Home” also brought a DC-centric tribute to E.T., with a story that centered on a time-lost baby alien being pursued by federal agents and protected by a young Ray Palmer.

The Batman is in theaters today.