Lea Thompson Explains Why She Didn't Want to Like Michael J. Fox Before Meeting Him: "I Remember Specifically Being Really Snooty"

To see the cast of the Back to the Future trilogy reunite these days, you would assume that they’ve always been the closest of friends, and that’s mostly true. Once they got to know each other, they all had a great love and admiration for one another, but by her own admission, Lea Thompson was actually a very tough nut to crack when it came to meeting her co-star Michael J. Fox.

During a recent interview on the Still Here Hollywood podcast (via CinemaBlend), Thompson, who played Lorraine McFly in all three Back to the Future movies and Maggie McFly in Part III, recalled to host Steve Kmetko that she “probably” didn’t hit it off right away with Fox.

That was in part due to her being friends with actor Eric Stoltz, who was originally set to play Marty McFly, but was fired after director and co-writer Robert Zemeckis deemed he wasn’t right for the role after all, even though he had shot several scenes for the film. Thompson went on two years after the first Back to the Future movie to start alongside Stoltz in the classic 1987 teen romantic drama Some Kind of Wonderful.

On top of the fact that her friend had been ousted from the project, Thompson shared that she looked down on Fox for another reason as well:

“I remember specifically being really snooty because there was a big division between movie stars and TV stars at that point. I remember being like, ‘He's just a TV star, and I'm a movie star. I was in Jaws 3D.’ So, I think it took me a while to warm up to him, but he was so funny and so fun to act with.”

Fox famously became a household name while starring in the beloved series Family Ties. Anyone who watched an episode of that show would have known that Fox was immensely talented. He had such great comedic timing, it just makes sense that he became a huge star. This was the reason that he was always the studio’s first choice to play Marty McFly, but he was replaced by Stoltz when Fox’s TV schedule seemed impossible to get around. Once he was reapproached, he was able to work out a deal that let him make both his show and the hit film.

Despite her initial iciness towards Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson did believe that the Marty McFly recasting would improve Back to the Future’s chances of success, reasoning that the filmmakers must have known what they were doing because of how it expensive it was to change the actors this far along into the creative process. The actress also said:

“You know, everybody always wants to be like, ‘Oh, wasn't that fun?’ You know, that's what people wanna hear. And it was very — it was a lot of pressure, and it was scary business, especially after they fired Eric Stoltz. You were like, ‘This is not fun and games. This is big business and, you know, a big deal.'“

It all ended up working out, and luckily Fox proved to Thompson that he was not only the right guy for the job, but a really nice guy as well.