Michael J. Fox says Christopher Lloyd made him feel welcome on Back to the Future when others on the production dismissed him as a “schmuck from TV.”
The actors revisited the difficult casting change in a conversation published by Interview on October 26. Fox had replaced Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly six weeks into filming the 1985 movie.
Fox recalled believing that his partnership with Lloyd was the key to finding his footing. If the relationship between Marty and Doc Brown worked, he could feel secure in the role.
Their conversation, recorded over Zoom on September 1, accompanied Lloyd’s new memoir, In My Own Time. Grand Central Publishing released the book on October 27, five days after the actor’s 88th birthday.
Fox Praised Lloyd for Giving Other Actors Room to Work
Fox credited Lloyd’s own television background with helping him understand the newcomer. Lloyd had played Reverend Jim Ignatowski on Taxi, while Fox was starring on NBC’s Family Ties. “You don’t think your process is more important than anyone else’s process,” Fox told him.
Fox’s admiration began before they met. He recalled seeing Lloyd in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a teenager during a family trip to Calgary and being struck by how fully the actors inhabited their characters.
Lloyd Says Their Personal Friendship Took Longer to Develop
View this post on Instagram
In an excerpt published by Hachette Book Group, Lloyd writes that the actors generally kept to themselves between takes. He recalled their generation gap and Fox’s exhausting workload, which sometimes left him sleeping while traveling between productions.
“It would take two more Back to the Future movies before Michael and I truly got to know each other and become friends,” Lloyd wrote.
In March 2026, Fox shared a photograph of the pair at a restaurant, captioning it, “Dining with my bestie at the beach.” As People reported, Lloyd replied with Marty’s familiar expression: “Man, that’s heavy.”
A Train Stunt Still Bothers Lloyd About ‘Back to the Future Part III’
Lloyd names the 1990 Western-themed Back to the Future Part III as his favorite installment. In a memoir passage reported by Entertainment Weekly, he describes riding a horse alongside the moving locomotive during its climactic sequence.
He was instructed to leave the transfer from horseback to the train to a stunt performer. The handle was within reach, and Lloyd felt tempted to grab it and pull himself aboard. He followed the production’s instructions.
Although he acknowledges that he cannot know what would have happened had he tried, watching the scene still leaves him thinking, “I should have done it.”