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<\/p>\nIt\u2019s a cold January night in Los Angeles. A vast shopping mall car park has been sprayed with water so that it glistens and is then lit at great expense. Even in the farthest corners there are artful shadows and streaks of luminescence.<\/p>\n
You are a 23-year-old television actor in a sitcom at a time when that means middlebrow with a laughter track and a jolly theme song. Now you have been shanghaied into a movie produced by the great Steven Spielberg. You marvel at the lighting, the equipment, the free food. You are dressed in a puffer jacket over many layers of shirts, playing someone called Marty McFly, unaware that this role is about to make you an indelible part of 1980s pop culture. The cameras roll, the back of a lorry opens and out comes a swirl of dry ice and a car you haven\u2019t seen before: a silver DeLorean.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this guy jumps out and he goes, \u2018Marty!\u2019 \u201d says Michael J Fox, our hero. \u201cI\u2019m, like, \u2018Holy shit!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
The other fellow was Christopher Lloyd in character as Doc Brown, a wild-haired, white-coated scientist who has turned a substandard sports car into a time machine. Fox was meeting him for the first time as the cameras rolled. There had been zero rehearsal. They were filming at night because Fox, after a period of penury, was now doing two full-time jobs at once.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome would say it was impossible,\u201d Fox says, echoing Sherlock Holmes. \u201cI say it\u2019s improbable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The movie we now know as Back to the Future had been shooting for six weeks with another actor, Eric Stoltz, in the lead role, but the film-makers were unhappy with his performance. They decided to replace him with Fox and start all over again. The rest of the cast were startled, the crew unnerved. Robert Zemeckis, the director, recalls giving them the news and then nipping to a payphone and calling his wife to say: \u201cI\u2019m going to finish this movie and then we\u2019re moving to Alaska. Because this is the end. My career is completely over.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Christopher Lloyd as the eccentric Doc Brown and Fox as Marty McFly with their time-travelling DeLorean in Back to the Future, 1985<\/p>\n
REX<\/p>\n
If you watch the film and know to look for it, you can see an expression of pure blank bewilderment flit across Fox\u2019s face as Lloyd starts into it: his eyes bulging, his face pulsing and twitching with ideas.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe came out and exploded into his Chris-ness, his Chris-tiosity,\u201d Fox says. \u201cAnd I realised it was going to be great.\u201d<\/p>\n
We are seated in Fox\u2019s office in Manhattan 40 years later. At 64 he looks more or less the same \u2014 except that for more than half of his life now he has lived with Parkinson\u2019s disease, a degenerative brain condition that can cause involuntary movements, stiffness and loss of balance. Mostly he still sounds like himself but also like a man who must sometimes fight to make himself understood. Several times he talks about \u201chaving the courage to stay to the end of the sentence\u201d, which feels like both a metaphor and a pep talk. He has broken quite a lot of bones lately and no longer walks for fear of falling.<\/p>\n
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Lloyd on set with Eric Stoltz, who was initially cast as McFly before the film-makers chose Fox, below, and reshot the movie from scratch<\/p>\n
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Yet he has also become a beacon for anyone with the disease. A friend of mine whose father died with Parkinson\u2019s used to watch Fox obsessively whenever he appeared in public. I suppose he feels the pressure of all these people looking to him? \u201cIt\u2019s lovely,\u201d Fox says. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once, when people saw someone with Parkinson\u2019s, their hands shaking and their step unsteady, they thought the person must be drunk. \u201cNow you just have to say, \u2018I have what Michael J Fox does,\u2019 \u201d he says. His foundation has raised more than $2 billion for research into early detection and treatments.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Michael J Fox gives \u00a35m to Scottish scientists working on Parkinson\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n Fox has a ginger goatee and is dressed in a grey T-shirt and blue tracksuit trousers. His hair is red-brown and mussed up under a white baseball cap, and he keeps a small towel on his knee that he picks up from time to time to wipe his face. On one wrist he has a silver watch, and sometimes when he sways it clonks on one of the metal arms of the chair. Talking to him about Back to the Future feels like interviewing a war veteran about D-Day.<\/p>\n Watching the film now, you travel even further back in time than Marty does. \u201c2025 to 1985 is a bigger gulf,\u201d Fox says. \u201cThere are much more changes to the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n He thinks the film speaks to us because it is about standing up to a bully, and \u201cright now\u2026 in the present we\u2019re having a bully problem. Bullies all over the place.\u201d Bob Gale, the film\u2019s co-writer with Zemeckis, based the character of Biff the bully at least partly on Donald Trump, who now looms over all of us. I suppose that is what Fox is talking about?<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a little dystopian stuff happening,\u201d he says. He worries about funding for science in the US, he worries about the arts. \u201cAnd Jimmy Kimmel can\u2019t be funny. It\u2019s just, what are you talking about?\u201d<\/p>\n Fox with the cast of Family Ties, 1982<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n He met his future wife, Tracy Pollan, on set when she was cast as his girlfriend in 1985<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just politics, though. \u201cParkinson\u2019s is a bully. There are all kinds of bullies.\u201d He looks up, like Marty looking up over Biff\u2019s shoulder, before he throws an air punch. \u201cYou stand up for yourself,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think we are gearing up for that. I think we are gearing up for stopping the bullies.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox has written four books about living hopefully with Parkinson\u2019s. Now he has co-written a fifth, called Future Boy, about being shoved on to the set of Back to the Future. I didn\u2019t expect it to be so exciting. It\u2019s almost as thrilling as the film.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just this kid,\u201d he says of the year his career went into orbit. \u201cA 23-year-old kid who lucked into a TV series after a couple of years of poverty. And this upped it one degree.\u201d<\/p>\n Today he lives in a beautiful building overlooking Central Park. The office is downstairs, in a ground-floor space where you might usually expect to find an upmarket dentist or a plastic surgeon. It is decorated with large black-and-white photographs of his musical heroes (Alice Cooper, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra) and shelves loaded with film and television awards: a Grammy, an honorary Oscar, four Emmys.<\/p>\n His longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry sits beside him. She is 63 and has worked with him for 30 years, at his production company and then at the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson\u2019s Research. They wrote Future Boy together, interviewing all the principal players.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u2018Yes, it hurts a lot\u2019 \u2014 Michael J Fox on 30 years of living with Parkinson\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n In the book there are glimpses of Fox\u2019s early life in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, the fifth of six children. His mother was a clerk, his father worked as a police dispatcher. He played ice hockey and lacrosse; he had the occasional fistfight. \u201cAnd lost a few,\u201d he says. He was always small. \u201cI would never win. My favourite thing \u2014 if I was gonna get beat up I\u2019d get in a swing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He wanted to be a rock star. \u201cActing \u2014 I just fell into because it paid me,\u201d he says. After landing a few roles as a teenager, he dropped out of school and his father agreed to drive him down to Los Angeles to find an agent. It went well at first, then badly. By his early twenties he was foraging for food from shop dustbins. \u201cI figured out when they threw out the stale cookies,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d just kind of be lurking. I\u2019d jump in and grab the cookies.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox performs with Roger Daltrey of the Who in support of his Parkinson\u2019s foundation, 2008<\/p>\n GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n He was saved by a sitcom called Family Ties featuring the Keatons: hippy parents who find, to their horror, that their children are conservative. Fox, as their preppy son Alex, began to steal the show. Even so, when the producer Gary Goldberg summoned him to his office one evening, he feared he was about to be fired.<\/p>\n Instead Goldberg explained that his friend Steven Spielberg was making a time-travel movie. Months earlier he had asked if Fox could play the lead and Goldberg had said he was not available as he was busy shooting 26 episodes of Family Ties. So Stoltz, best known today as the heroin dealer in Pulp Fiction, was cast instead.<\/p>\n Stoltz was proceeding with an interesting take on the time-travelling teenager who changes the past and returns to 1985 and a family that is happier than the one he left. Stoltz saw this as a tragedy: Marty is the only one of his family who remembers a sadder past. He dressed in black and approached the role as a Method actor: off camera everyone had to call him Marty.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had a more drama-based take on things,\u201d Fox says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s really, totally valid. It\u2019s a take. It\u2019d be cool to see \u2014 to see that movie.\u201d<\/p>\n But the team behind the film \u2014 Zemeckis, his co-writer Gale and Spielberg, the executive producer \u2014 \u201chad more of a slapstick thing in mind\u201d.<\/p>\n After six weeks of time-machine Hamlet they went to see Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal Pictures, and told him they wanted to drop Stoltz and put in Fox as Marty. As they started explaining their plan, Sheinberg stood up, put on his jacket and walked out of the office.<\/p>\n \u201cSteven and I are running behind him, still talking all the way to the elevator,\u201d Zemeckis told Fox. \u201cSid gets in and turns back to us. As the elevator doors close, he says to me, \u2018You, sir, are insane.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Fox did not know any of this at the time. But he acted, from the start, as if he had been cast in a screwball comedy. \u201cDoc!\u201d he squeaks, like an old vaudeville player. \u201cAre you telling me you built a time machine\u2026 out of a DeLorean?\u201d<\/p>\n This was exactly what was wanted. \u201cAnd that,\u201d Fox says, \u201cis more my milieu.\u201d<\/p>\n Stoltz did not want to be interviewed on the record for Fox\u2019s book, but he did come to what Fox calls his \u201cman cave\u201d for a long chat. I ask Fox if he was nervous.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t get nervous much any more,\u201d he replies. \u201cIf you spend your life concentrating on the worst possible scenario, you lose it twice when it actually happens.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox with his family in LA in 2022. From left: his son, Sam, daughter Esm\u00e9, wife, Tracy, and twin daughters, Aquinnah and Schuyler<\/p>\n AFP<\/p>\n Fortenberry says she was worried about the meeting until she heard laughter coming from Fox\u2019s office: the two Marty McFlys, tragic and comic, getting on together after all these years.<\/p>\n We look through some photographs of Fox on the set of Back to the Future. There he is asleep on a mattress; there he is asleep standing up against the wall. He was filming until 2am. Then a guy would drive him home and all but carry him into his bed. Another one would wake him three hours later with a revised script for the latest episode of Family Ties. He was exhausted. He thinks this made some of his choices more instinctive.<\/p>\n \u201cI just thought about this guy, this kid whose life \u2014 it explodes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n When he was not asleep, Fox enjoyed himself tremendously. He had always wanted to be a rock star; now he got to be one, playing the Chuck Berry song Johnny B Goode, at a high school dance in 1955. Marty\u2019s parents have got together by this point and the scene is unnecessary, strictly speaking, to the film. It is there just for the joy of it. A generation of musicians now say they were inspired by that scene to pick up a guitar; and Fox, in turn, got asked to play the song in arenas. One of the photographs in his office is of Fox playing Johnny B Goode with the Who. Last year he played guitar on stage with Coldplay at Glastonbury.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what was great about Back to the Future,\u201d Fox says. \u201cThe fantasy of that movie wasn\u2019t for Marty, the fantasy was for me. And the playing guitar for Marty [was] playing guitar for me. It was just \u2014 it all just exploded, and I\u2019d skip to the next thing [thinking], this is really happening! This is really happening!\u201d<\/p>\n He was the luckiest kid in the world, living two lives at once, leaving streaks of flame behind him. Back to the Future became a trilogy and made him famous around the world. He met his wife, Tracy Pollan, when she played his girlfriend in Family Ties and they married in 1988, the year that he won his third Emmy (he also won a Golden Globe for the show). And then, six years into this golden run, his luck ran out. In 1991 Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson\u2019s. He was 29.<\/p>\n Youth \u201cwasn\u2019t wasted on me\u201d, he wrote once. \u201cI just didn\u2019t know I\u2019d go straight from young to old.\u201d But he dealt with it in public in the same hopeful manner that made him a star in the first place.<\/p>\n A doctor told him that his physicality, as an actor, might help him to cope with the disease. This was the fellow who improvised a leaping slide over the bonnet of the DeLorean; a chap who once somersaulted over a lover, in the sitcom series Spin City, while taking his trousers off in mid-air.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was helpful, to a point,\u201d Fox says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s [the point] where I break stuff. It\u2019s absolutely incredible the stuff I broke. In a three-year period I broke my elbow, I broke my hand, I got a big infection in my hand and I almost lost my finger.\u201d<\/p>\n He can no longer play the guitar that leans beside his desk. \u201cIt\u2019s terrible,\u201d he says. \u201cI had all these little bones broken and it got infected and they had to cut the bones out because the bones got infected.\u201d He shows me his left hand, the fingers bunched and stiff. \u201cI broke my other shoulder, had it replaced. I broke my cheekbone.\u201d He points to it. \u201cI had a plate here.\u201d He looks at Fortenberry. \u201cI\u2019m missing something?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been just like a tragedy,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI take it easy now,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t walk that much any more. I can walk but it\u2019s not pretty and it\u2019s a bit dangerous. So I just roll that into my life, you know \u2014 no pun intended.\u201d<\/p>\n He and Pollan have four children. Sam, the eldest, is a 36-year-old television producer and actor; their twin daughters, Schuyler and Aquinnah, 30, both work in production too. Esm\u00e9, 23, a student at Duke University in North Carolina, wants to be an actor. \u201cShe\u2019s really good,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n What is it like for them to see him in Back to the Future \u2014 their dad in the time before Parkinson\u2019s? \u201cThey don\u2019t watch it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The cast of Back to the Future reunite in 2023. From left, Lloyd, Fox, Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson<\/p>\n LEA THOMPSON \/ INSTAGRAM<\/p>\n I ask about his future. \u201cThere\u2019s no timeline, there\u2019s no series of stages that you go through \u2014 not in the same way that you would, say, with prostate cancer. It\u2019s much more mysterious and enigmatic,\u201d he says with an expansive shrug.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are not many people who have had Parkinson\u2019s for 35 years,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d like to just not wake up one day. That\u2019d be really cool. I don\u2019t want it to be dramatic. I don\u2019t want to trip over furniture, smash my head.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"MICHAEL](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/3b61c57a-7464-41f5-9e9e-91f4a2f4f383.jpg\")
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