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His height was a major factor in the recasting of the girlfriend part, Fox writes in new memoir
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Published Dec 02, 2025 • Last updated 3 hours ago • 4 minute read
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Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Photo by Universal PicturesArticle content
Michael J. Fox has revealed that when he replaced Eric Stoltz in 1985’s Back to the Future another up-and-coming actress was fired.
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In an excerpt of his new memoir, Future Boy, on the making of the film, obtained by Entertainment Weekly, Fox, now 64, says that after he stepped in weeks into production to play a time-travelling high school student, Melora Hardin, one of the future stars of The Office, lost her job as Marty McFly’s girlfriend.
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The B.C.-born Fox writes his shortness “worked in my favour when I was a teenage actor playing a younger kid, but it turned against me as an adult, when I went up for romantic leads opposite taller actresses.”
He says that his goal as a young actor was “self-preservation” and that he “suffered the indignity of short jokes and prejudice against my smallness.
“Bullies often ridiculed my height, an easy target,” Fox writes.
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But when he was cast in the Steven Spielberg-produced film, Hardin, who had been hired to play Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer Parker, was dropped in favour of actress Claudia Wells after director Robert Zemeckis axed Stolz once filming began.
Christopher Lloyd (as Dr. Emmett Brown), Michael J. Fox (as Marty McFly) in ‘Back to the Future.’ Photo by Universal Pictures
“I regret that this prejudice inadvertently affected another cast member in Back to the Future –– Melora Hardin, the talented actress who had played Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, opposite the perfectly tall Eric Stoltz,” Fox explains.
“Melora, several inches taller than me, was replaced in the movie after I took over as Marty,” Fox adds. “Initially, Bob Zemeckis thought perhaps the audience could look past our height difference, but when he quickly surveyed the female members of the crew, they assured him that the tall pretty girl in high school rarely picks the cute short guy.”
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Fox, who had already started making waves in Hollywood playing Alex P. Keaton on the the NBC sitcom Family Ties, says he wasn’t a big enough star to advocate on Hardin’s behalf.
“No one asked for my opinion, but I would have risen to Melora’s defence,” he says.
How Fox and Stoltz became friends
In a recent interview with PEOPLE, Fox praised Stoltz’s work with director Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction and said they met while he was working on the book.
“It was great. It was a great conversation. It was just two guys talking, which is what I thought it would be,” Fox told the outlet. “There’s all this mythology built up about this thing that happened. Was it backstabbing? Was there people conniving and being evil? No, it just was the thing that happened … We had different experiences with the same situation and you absorb it and you move on.”
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While speaking at Calgary Fan Expo in April, Fox called Stoltz a “wonderful actor… who since has become a friend of mine and someone I’ve had a good time with, talking about this turn in our lives and how we both ended up in different places.”
In Future Boy, Fox reveals that the two crossed paths in the early 1980s when they were both up for the same part in a 1983 drama that starred David Keith, Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton.
“During our early struggles to find a foothold in the movie business, we had both auditioned for Franc Roddam’s intensely dramatic, intensely dark, intensely intense movie The Lords of Discipline, about a military academy in the South,” Fox writes, according to PEOPLE. “The casting director asked us to read a scene together, and Eric took the ‘intense’ note to heart, forcefully grabbing my shirt and nearly tearing it in half. Neither of us got the part.”
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In another passage, Fox adds that their experience on Back to the Future “had not made us enemies or fated rivals.”
“We were just two dedicated actors who had poured equal amounts of energy into the same role. The rest had nothing to do with us. As it turned out, we had much more in common than our spin as Marty,” he says, per Entertainment Weekly. “In the months since meeting, Eric and I have maintained a friendly correspondence – volleys back and forth between like-minded actors and dads, offering up recent movies we’ve loved, the latest adventures with our kids and an occasional detour into politics.”
Hardin talks about the job loss
Meanwhile, Hardin reflected on losing the role of Jennifer during a stop on The Joe Vulpis Podcast.
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“I went and did some promotional pictures and stuff. And then (weeks) into filming, they fired Eric and brought in Michael J. Fox,” she recalled. “When they did that, it was apparently the two female executives at the time that thought that it was emasculating for their lead character male to be in scenes with a woman that was taller than him.”
Melora Hardin as Jan Levinson and Steve Carell as Michael Scott in ‘The Office.’ Photo by Paul Drinkwater /NBC
Hardin said losing the job was “crushing” and “very, very upsetting” but added that she may have very likely never gotten her role on The Office if she had played Jennifer.
Wells, who was the actress Zemeckis wanted in the first place, was replaced for subsequent Back to the Future sequels by Elisabeth Shue after she stepped away from the series to care for her dying mother.
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