‘Back to the Future’ Costars Michael J. Fox & Christopher Lloyd Reunite at NYCC
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads… but we can always use reunions! And we’re happy to report that Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd treated Back to the Future fans with a chat about the movie trilogy at this year’s New York Comic Con.
For starters, the reuniting co-stars discussed Fox’s casting in 1985’s Back to the Future, the film that started it all. As devotees well know, director Robert Zemeckis originally cast Eric Stoltz in the role of time-traveling teen Marty McFly. And it was only after weeks of principal photography that Zemeckis and other producers chose to replace Stoltz with Fox.
“The announcement — at one o’ clock in the morning after we were shooting for six weeks — was that the actor playing Marty would no longer be playing Marty, and that tomorrow, we would start shooting with Michael,” Lloyd said at the NYCC panel on Saturday, October 8, as Syfy.com reports. “I felt that I barely made it through the [first] six weeks, and now I was gonna have to do it again?!”
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But Lloyd soon saw the logic. “The chemistry was there from the first scene we had, it was alive, and it remained that way for three movies,” he said of working with Fox. “It hasn’t gone away, by the way.”
And Fox returned his costar’s praise. “All I had to do was just react,” he told the crowd. “Just take it in and let it wash over me. I thought he was brilliant. That was the whole thing: be with Chris and let it be Chris, and enjoy it … It was a thrill. Anytime I got to work with him, I knew it was gonna be a good day.”
In their discussion on Saturday, Fox and Lloyd also spoke highly of the Back to the Future stage musical now playing on London’s West End and premiering soon on Broadway. “I don’t see how they could have done it better,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd, 83, has continued to act in recent years, guest-starring in the shows NCIS and The Conners, for example. But Fox, who had long arcs on The Good Wife and Designated Survivor during the 2010s, announced in his 2020 memoir, No Time Like the Future, that he had retired from acting amid progressions in his case of Parkinson’s disease.
But Fox, now 61, said he wouldn’t change a thing about his Parkinson’s diagnosis. “The best thing that happened in my life was this thing,” he said. “Parkinson’s is a gift. I’ve said to people it’s a gift, and they say, ‘You’re nuts.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but it’s the gift that keeps on taking.’ But it’s a gift, and I wouldn’t change it for anything … It’s not about what I have, it’s about what I’ve been given.”
