Michael J. Fox on Finally Meeting Eric Stoltz 40 Years After BACK TO THE FUTURE Shake-Up
It’s been four decades since Back to the Future hit theaters and became one of the most beloved sci-fi adventures of all time. But behind that lightning bolt of success was a major Hollywood story, Michael J. Fox famously replaced Eric Stoltz partway through filming as Marty McFly.
Now, all these years later, the two actors finally met, and it sounds like the long-awaited meeting was nothing but positive.
Fox, now 64, revealed to People that he and Stoltz recently connected while he was working on his new memoir Future Boy, which explores the whirlwind period when he was filming both Family Ties and Back to the Future at the same time.
“When I set out to write Future Boy, we talked to everyone — Robert Zemeckis, Lea Thompson, Justine Bateman — but Eric was one of the few who declined to participate,” Fox said.
Stoltz, who was originally cast as Marty McFly, was replaced a few weeks into production when Zemeckis and his team realized he wasn’t quite the right fit for the film’s lighter tone.
Even though Stoltz passed on contributing to the book, Fox said the actor, who has remained largely silent about the Back to the Future experience for four decades, agreed to meet him in person.
“It was great. It was a great conversation. It was just two guys talking, which is what I thought it would be,” Fox shared. The meeting took place at Fox’s New York City office, and he described it as an honest, genuine reconnection.
“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,” Fox continued. “We had different experiences with the same situation and you absorb it and you move on.”
Though Fox is keeping most of their private talk under wraps, he does share one funny story in his memoir about realizing they’d actually met before Back to the Future.
“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 in Future Boy.
“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.”
That movie, which ended up starring David Keith, Michael Biehn, and Bill Paxton, hit theaters in 1983.
Since their meeting, Fox says the two have actually become friends. At a Back to the Future panel at the Calgary Expo earlier this year, Fox praised Stoltz as 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.”
“I've learned a lot about acceptance and perseverance from him. He's a great guy, Eric Stoltz,” Fox added.
For Back to the Future fans, hearing that the two men finally shared a moment of peace and friendship is something pretty cool.