Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd arrived at New York Comic-Con in their time-traveling DeLorean to reminisce on their career-defining performances in the Back to the Future film trilogy.
The actors began the event by discussing how Fox was famously selected to replace Eric Stoltz in the part of Marty McFly a little over a month after the main production began. Lloyd, in particular, recalled that the announcement (made by director Robert Zemeckis, executive producer Steven Spielberg, and the other production heavyweights) came after several arduous night shoots dedicated to the sequence at the Twin Pines Mall, where Doc Brown reveals he has finally cracked the code to time travel.
“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 recalled to generous applause from the sizable crowd. “I felt that I barely made it through the [first] six weeks and now I was gonna have to do it again?!”
Fox’s mother didn’t want him to take the position because she was afraid he’d be too weary from his work in Family Ties. But the experience was too great to pass up, and he eventually chose to join the cast of the iconic movie. While this resulted in a rigorous filming schedule ranging across the realms of cinema and television, his decision proved to be correct. Marty and Doc’s friendship is what binds the entire piece together, and the last-minute casting change could not have been better. “The chemistry was there from the first scene we had, it was alive, and it remained that way for three movies,” Lloyd noted of their collective onscreen presence. “It hasn’t gone away, by the way.”
“All I had to do was just react,” said Fox, referring to his co-star’s performance. “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.”
A stage musical based on the original film is presently running in London, with plans to bring it to Broadway next year.”I don’t see how they could have done it better,” Lloyd said. Fox also praised the show: “It was fantastic. They could have fallen into the trap of imitating us, but they didn’t. The characters were fully-realized on their own, I thought the play was really well-written, the music was great, and I’m gonna go when it comes to New York.” Bob Gale (co-writer of Back to the Future with Zemeckis) penned the musical and “put his whole heart and soul into it,” Fox added.
Despite his decades-long fight with Parkinson’s disease, Fox reaffirmed his dedication to interacting with supporters in person.
“You guys have given me my whole life,” he declared, later admitting that he would not change his diagnosis if given the chance; that helping others has given his life a profound new meaning. “The best thing thing that happened in my life was this thing. 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.”
At the end of the panel, Fox and Lloyd were asked to leave the audience with some pearls of wisdom. Lloyd used a statement from Back to the Future Part III’s Doc Brown, saying, “Your future is what you make of it, so make it a good one!” Fox opted for an oxymoronic line from his favorite movie, Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here, this is the war room.” His takeaway? No matter how crazy things become, just “suck in your breath, go ahead, and carry on.”