10 Actors Who Got Paid To NOT Star In Movies

Unbeknownst to many who saw the film, legendary actor Harrison Ford was set to have a small cameo in Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus as the headteacher of Elliot’s school. In the scene, Elliot gets sent to the headmaster when E.T. starts affecting his school life. Ford turned up and did the scene as well with no problems, but Spielberg cut it before the film reached cinemas.

In the end, all that remains of the character in the film is Ford’s distinctive voice. However, the reason as to why Spielberg cut Ford from the film is the fear that Ford’s cameo might take away from E.T. and Elliot, as Ford was such a popular actor at the time thanks to Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Spielberg didn’t want Ford to distract from the main point of the movie, especially when it came to marketing the film as Ford would have hogged the limelight, so his scene was cut out before the film was shown in theatres.

This thought process never left Spielberg either as although blurry clips of the Ford scene have ended up on YouTube, the deleted sequence has never been officially released. Even when it came to the film’s 20th Anniversary Edition, which re-did a lot of the film’s original content, Ford was still left out of the film altogether.