January Jones and 13-Year-Old Son Xander Step Out in Rare Public Appearance
Michael J. Fox took his DeLorean to the Southampton Playhouse.
The actor hit the gas to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future at the New York movie theater on Aug. 10.
For the rare appearance, Michael—who lives with Parkinson’s disease—was all smiles in brown pants and a black button-down shirt. Along with rewatching the 1985 movie, the 64-year-old stayed behind for a post-screening conversation about his acting career and work with the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
The Back to the Future celebration comes three months after Apple TV revealed that the actor is returning to the screen as a guest star in the upcoming third season of Shrinking.
For Harrison Ford, whose character Paul Rhoades was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in season one, Michael’s addition has been “essential.”
“Michael’s courage, his fortitude and his grace, more than anything else, is on full display,” he told Variety last month. “He’s very smart, very brave, noble, generous, passionate guy, and an example to all of us, whether we’re facing Parkinson’s or not. You cannot help but recognize how amazing it is to have such grace.”
“He gives me both a physical representation of the disease to inform myself with,” he continued, “but more than that, he allows me to believe that Paul could believe that he could be adequate to the challenge.”
In 2021, Michael—who shares kids Sam Fox, 36, Aquinnah Fox, 30, Schuyler Fox, 30, and Esmé Fox, 23, with wife Tracey Pollan—shared insight into his decision to step away from acting as his health continued to deteriorate.
Sonia Moskowitz Gordon
“I continued to act for almost 30 years after I was diagnosed,” he explained to AARP Magazine. “I reached the point where I couldn’t rely on my ability to speak on any given day, which meant I couldn’t act comfortably at all anymore. So, last year I gave it up.”
But he was always willing to return for a project that caught his eye.
“If someone offers me a part and I do it and I have a good time, great,” he revealed to Entertainment Tonight in April 2024. “I would do acting if something came up that I could put my realities into it, my challenges, if I could figure it out.”
Now, take the DeLorean to 88 mph for a look at these fascinating facts about Back to the Future.
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1. Writer and producer Bob Gale came up with the idea for Back to the Future while looking through his father’s high school yearbooks during a visit with family and discovering his dad was the president of his graduating class. As he put it to Esquire, “I wondered whether I would have been friends with my dad in high school.”
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2. For years, multiple studios passed on the script, more than 40 rejections in total. Among them: Disney, with Gale claiming they said, “Are you guys out of your minds? You can’t make a movie like this here. This is Disney, and you’re giving us a movie about incest!”
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3. Not a fan of the title, Universal Pictures head Sid Sheinberg suggested the name be changed to Spaceman From Pluto.
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4. John Cusack and Johnny Depp originally auditioned for the role of Marty McFly, but C. Thomas Howell was the finalist for the role, ultimately losing out to Eric Stoltz.
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5. Five weeks into filming, the filmmakers realized Stoltz wasn’t the right fit for the role, with Gale explaining to The Guardian, “The humor just hadn’t been coming through with Eric. The studio weren’t happy exactly, but they’d seen the footage so they bit the bullet.”
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6. Director Robert Zemeckis was the one to deliver the news to Stoltz, with the filmmaker recalling in the book Blockbuster that it was “the hardest meeting I’ve ever had in my life and it was all my fault. I broke his heart.”
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7. Reshooting all of the scenes Stoltz had already filmed added a reported $4 million to the movie’s budget.
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8. Because Michael J. Fox was the original first choice for Marty, the filmmakers worked with the team at his hit sitcom Family Ties to make sure they could have him as their leading man. “We would’ve danced naked on his desk to get Michael J. Fox, so of course we said, ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll adjust our shooting schedule,'” Gale told The Hundreds blog.
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9. Fox’s filming schedule was intense: He would shoot Family Ties during the day and then go right to the Back to the Future set from 6:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., averaging five hours of sleep a night. “It was my dream to be in the film and television business, although I didn’t know I’d be in them simultaneously,” Fox said during a TV special. “It was just this weird ride and I got on.”
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10. There is one scene with Stoltz still in the film. Though you can’t see his face, it’s Stoltz who punches Tom Wilson‘s Biff at the diner.
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11. In the original script, Doc Brown was called Professor Brown, with a studio executive recommending the change.
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12. Jeff Goldblum auditioned for the role of Doc Brown, according to Gale, who said, “The only other guy we really seriously considered for Doc Brown was Jeff Goldblum. Jeff came in, and…I’m certain we talked about John Lithgow, but I don’t remember if he ever actually came in, or if we met him. But I vividly remember meeting Jeff and liking him.”
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13. Christopher Lloyd almost passed on the iconic role, hoping to do a play in New York instead. But he credited his wife, Carol, who “reminded me that I always told myself never to turn anything down without at least checking it out.”
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14. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Lloyd revealed his two inspirations for Doc: Albert Einstein and Philadelphia orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski, who had white hair.
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15. One of the reasons for Doc’s hunched over stance? To help with the seven-inch height difference between the two leads.
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16. The Office‘s Melora Hardin initially snagged the role of Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, but was recast before she even began filming after Fox replaced Stoltz. The issue: At 5-foot-5, she was an inch taller than Fox.
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17. Though Claudia Wells originally played Jennifer in the first film, she retired from acting after her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Elisabeth Shue took over the role for the remaining installments.
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18. Originally, the studio was hoping Doc’s car would be a Ford Mustang, with the company paying for the placement, but Gale refused, telling AdWeek, “I said, ‘No, no, no, Doc Brown doesn’t drive a f–king Mustang.’ It had to be a DeLorean.”
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19. Huey Lewis, who wrote the hit songs “The Power of Love,” and “Back in Time” for the film, makes a cameo as one of the judges in the band audition.
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20. Lewis originally declined to work on music for the movie when he was approached by the director.
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21. In an early draft, the time machine was set to be a refrigerator, but Zemeckis was worried children would accidentally lock themselves in refrigerators, so it was changed to a car.
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22. Originally slated to open in August 1985, test audiences reacted so positively to the movie that the studio moved the release date up. Back to the Future hit theaters nine weeks after completing production.
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23. Crispin Glover, who played Marty’s father George McFy, didn’t return for the sequels due to contract disputes. He later filed a lawsuit after filmmakers used footage from the first film and put a mold of his face on another actor “in order to fool audiences into thinking I was in the movie,” he said on The Opie and Anthony Show.
Ultimately, a settlement was reached, with The Hollywood Reporter detailing that he received $760,000 at the behest of the company that insured Universal.
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24. Lea Thompson credits her turn in 1984’s The Wild Life for landing her the role of Lorraine, Marty’s mother, because “they were looking at Eric Stoltz for Marty McFly, and they were, like, ‘Who’s that girl?'” she told The A.V. Club. “So that’s how I got the first audition for that.”
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25. In the original script, Lorraine’s name was Meg.
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26. To achieve Lorraine’s 1985 look, Thompson’s prosthetic makeup took three and a half hours to apply.
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27. In 2015, footage of Stoltz as Marty was released for the first time in a documentary included on the 30th anniversary Blu-ray set. “We wanted to soft pedal that,” Gale said of the decision to release a small look at his performance. “We didn’t want to make Eric feel bad.”
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28. Back to the Future: The Animated series ran for two seasons, airing on CBS from 1991 until 1992.
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29. In March 2020, the musical adaptation of Back to the Future made its debut in England, with Olly Dobson as Marty McFly and Tony winner Roger Bart as Dr. Emmett Brown. It eventually made its way to Broadway, ending an 18-month run in January 2025.
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30. Zemeckis and Gale are firmly against the idea of a fourth film, with the director saying on a Zoom cast reunion that, “If I had an idea which I could have pitched to Bob [Gale] with a straight face, we would have made it.”
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