And as we sit in Fox’s Upper East Side office on a sweltering April afternoon, we’re surrounded by mementos and images from that rich family life. There are snapshots of Fox and his wife, Tracy Pollan, flanked by their four children on beaches and in backyards. There’s even a painting of Gus, staring back at us with soulful eyes. All of it vying for space with the Emmys, Golden Globes and honorary Oscar that Fox has accumulated for his work on sitcoms and movies, and for his advocacy for Parkinson’s research. They are milestones on an improbable journey, one that’s taken the 61-year-old from an obscure sliver of British Columbia to the height of Hollywood stardom, all while withstanding a devastating diagnosis when he should have been basking in that hard-won success. Through it all, Fox has been guided by an indomitable confidence — an optimism, not that any problem can be easily overcome, but that there are reasons to be grateful for what life with all its chaotic convulsions has to offer.+

“I’m still happy to join the day and be a part of things,” he says. “I just enjoy the little math problems of existence. I love waking up and figuring that stuff out and at the same time being with my family. My problem is I fall down. I trip over things and fall down and break things. And that’s part of having this. But I hope that, and I feel that, I won’t break as many bones tomorrow. So that’s being optimistic.”

There are signs of life’s inescapable progression around us too, as well as fresh reasons for hope. Just before Fox sits down, I’m greeted by a new addition to his household, Blue, an Aussie Bernedoodle puppy fresh from her walk. (“She’s not a dog — she’s a science experiment,” Fox joked to Pollan when she revealed that Blue was a combination of Australian shepherd, Bernese mountain dog and poodle.) And Fox is feeling emboldened by a recent scientific breakthrough that can detect the disease at the molecular level before symptoms start appearing. That could, he says, lead to more proactive treatment and drug development. And then there’s the reason that we’re meeting today, the upcoming release of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a documentary from Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim that explores the actor’s life and serves as a reminder of his formidable gifts as a comic star. Guggenheim says that Fox refused to have any control over the finished film, which begins streaming on Apple TV+ on May 12, leaving the director with a single creative admonition.

“The only thing he ever asked of me was no violins,” Guggenheim says. “He didn’t want to make a pitiful, maudlin movie about a person with a condition.”

“Still” steers clear of mawkishness, even as it offers an uplifting look at the triumph of one implacable spirit. But, of course, that’s to be expected, and by now people around the world are intimately familiar with how Fox turned a potentially career-ending diagnosis into a rallying cry for awareness and action. What’s more unexpected is that “Still” also gives Fox his due as a performer, something that critics were often loath to do when he was a leading box office draw and TV idol. In clips from “Family Ties” and “Spin City,” or snippets of “The Secret of My Success” and “Back to the Future,” Fox is constantly in motion, making pratfalls, backflipping over beds, sliding over the hood of a DeLorean. All of it is augmented by a preternatural sense of timing. He’s almost balletic in his ability to land a joke.

“I underestimated him as an actor,” Guggenheim admits. “And maybe until now the world has underestimated him. He’s super funny, but sometimes we fail to realize that humor and physical comedy is a craft worthy of awe. Seeing him move his body, he was graceful and swift and elegant. It seems effortless. And you’d think he was trained in some fancy French school of movement, which of course he wasn’t.”

Castmates fondly recall Fox’s gymnastic approach to comedy. “He bounced around in all of his scenes,” remembers Meredith Baxter, who played Fox’s TV mom in “Family Ties.” “He’d bound in the backdoor of the house, then he’d bounce over to the fridge and pour some orange juice and then he’d bounce again to answer the phone. He had so much energy.”

In its time, however, “Family Ties” and Fox were riding the zeitgeist. Yet what really catapulted Fox to the top of the A-list was “Back to the Future,” a science-fiction comedy about a 1980s high schooler named Marty McFly who finds himself thrown back in time to 1955. Fox was initially forced to pass on the film because of his commitment to the show. But when Eric Stoltz, the actor cast in the leading role, was fired from the production, director Robert Zemeckis and “Family Ties” showrunner Gary David Goldberg devised a plan that allowed Fox to shoot the sitcom during the day and then hustle to the “Back to the Future” set at night. He’d film there until 3 or 4 in the morning. In between, he’d get two to three hours of sleep before a teamster would wake him up and the whole thing would start again. It was grueling, but Fox thinks it helped his performance.

“I was running on adrenaline,” admits Fox. “I barely knew where I was, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. That served the film because Marty’s supposed to be disoriented.”

Christopher Lloyd, who played Doc Brown, the mad scientist who invents the time-traveling sports car that sends Marty back, says that Fox offered a missing ingredient. “Eric Stoltz is a wonderful actor, but he lacked a certain comedic sense that is inherent in Michael,” he says. “Initially, I was worried because we’d been shooting for six weeks, and it meant going back and redoing all my scenes. I thought I might not be as good. But Michael made me better.”

Zemeckis agrees. “Michael taught me things about comic timing. We’d have conversations, and he’d go, ‘You know, Bob, I’ll get a much bigger laugh if I move three steps, pause, and then say the line.’” “Back to the Future” is a frothy adventure, but it also has some unexpected Oedipal undercurrents — a risky touch for a popcorn flick. After all, when Marty travels back three decades to his hometown, he intersects with his teenage parents, only to find that his mother (Lea Thompson) is hellbent on getting in his pants.

“There’s something about it that people still respond to because it’s so weird,” Fox says. “Not to be crude, but it’s a movie about almost fucking your mom and she’s totally ready for it. Even at the time, I realized it was bizarre — plus Lea was pretty cute.”

“Back to the Future” was a mammoth, decade-bestriding blockbuster, becoming the highest-grossing movie of 1985 and launching a popular film franchise. Fox capitalized on that with a series of hits such as “Teen Wolf ” and “Secret of My Success” that made him one of the hottest stars of the 1980s. Looking back, Fox believes he didn’t handle fame well.

“I was a jerk,” he says. And there’s some archival footage in “Still” where Fox grills the writers of “Family Ties” about one of their scripts, as well as a sequence where he peevishly asks to retake a scene that, he says, captures that jerkishness. “You just want to slap me. You just want to go, ‘Shut up, sit down, have a Diet Coke and relax and sit in the corner,’” Fox says.

Sure, he seems egotistical, but it’s still pretty mild misbehavior for a celebrity. No telephones are thrown, no crew members berated. Is it possible Fox is a little too hard on himself? For their part, Fox’s co-stars don’t remember many diva moments. “I don’t think he lorded it over us,” says Baxter. ”At the same time, when someone gets all that attention and all that heat, it’s hard for it not to go to their head. You can’t fault where that adulation takes you. But if you stay there, then you become insufferable.”

Fox’s good fortune ran out as the 1990s dawned. “Family Ties” went off the air after seven seasons, and “Back to the Future” concluded with two back-to-back sequels. Then Fox suffered a series of flops including “Life With Mikey” and “For Love or Money,” films as generic as their titles. And there were missed opportunities — for instance, Fox turned down the future blockbuster “Ghost.” “I didn’t see how it would work,” he says. “It shows I can be an idiot too.”

There was a reason why Fox was taking jobs for the payday and not the part. What the world didn’t know was that he was processing his 1991 diagnosis of early onset Parkinson’s, something that doctors warned him meant he had only 10 years left to work.

“It’s such a shitty disease,” Fox says. “I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to deal with it. It didn’t fit my story. I just shut down.

He’d always been a heavy drinker, but his alcohol abuse intensified as he looked for ways to numb the pain. As he writes in his memoir “Lucky Man,” and as “Still” depicts, he finally decided to give up booze when Pollan made it clear that she wasn’t interested in raising kids with someone who was out of control.

Why did you drink? I ask. “My friend Jennifer Grey had a great expression in her memoir,” Fox explains. “She wrote, ‘My body cannot metabolize the excitement that I crave.’ And at that point, the same was true for me. I needed something — some way to express myself — and I used drinking.”

In 1996, with his window of opportunity to work fading and his film career stalling, Fox returned to the format that made him a phenomenon, reteaming with “Family Ties” creator Goldberg on “Spin City,” a sitcom about the various wheeler-dealers orbiting an inept mayor. The show was a ratings hit and critics loved having Fox back in front of a studio audience. But as his Parkinson’s worsened, producing the show became more complicated, often leading to long delays in taping. Some of the cast and crew suspected something was wrong, but they were offered various explanations, including that Fox had Lyme disease. A rare few were told the truth and sworn to secrecy.

“We knew about it very early because we had to plan around it, but we kept it from everybody else,” says Bill Lawrence, the co-creator of “Spin City.” “Because Michael had to take meds to stop his tremors and they don’t work instantly, Gary and I had to build around that in the schedule so we could wait to start until he was feeling up to it.”

In 1998, Fox couldn’t keep his illness under wraps any longer. For one thing, he says, paparazzi used to wait outside his apartment building, peppering him with questions about whether he had Parkinson’s. He decided to share the news, sitting down for interviews with Barbara Walters and People. The magazine was supposed to come out on a Tuesday, but on the previous Friday, People went live with its story online, triggering a media frenzy.

“I went online and initially I thought, ‘What have I done?’” Fox says. “‘My life is ruined, and I have little kids who are going to read this stuff.’ The New York tabloids had headlines about how my life was over. It was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

But as he processed the public’s reaction, Fox started exploring Parkinson’s chat rooms. On the internet, people who had the disease were sharing their hope that Fox’s celebrity would draw attention to an illness that was seen as something that only happened to old people. Those misunderstandings and prejudices meant that Parkinson’s was underfunded. Reading their messages, Fox saw an opportunity.

“People were naked in their thirst for somebody to come and help,” Fox says. “So as much as sharing that news was an unburdening, it also became a re-burdening. It was, I don’t know” — Fox’s hand moves gently as if to grasp the right words — “an adjustment of my burden.”

“Still” also refers to the inner peace Fox found after going public with his illness. Instead of serving as a coda, that declaration began a new phase in his life that was his most triumphant. Since launching the Michael J. Fox Foundation in 2000, he has helped raise more than $1 billion to fund Parkinson’s research. At the same time, Fox has become a prolific writer, penning memoirs that are hilarious, heartbreaking and bracingly candid. (“Everyone has one good book in them,” he says. “I’ve written four.”)

And though he officially retired from acting in 2020 because he was struggling to learn lines, Fox remained active in front of the camera for decades longer than doctors thought he would. Over the past 20 years, he returned to TV frequently — as an OCD doctor on “Scrubs,” as a lawyer on “The Good Wife,” and as himself, facing off against Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“I’ve won more awards and had more nominations since I announced my diagnosis,” says Fox. “It may be that people feel bad for me, but I prefer to look at it as an acknowledgment for continuing to have a legitimate career.”

Guggenheim spent a year interviewing Fox for “Still” and observing him relaxing with Pollan and their children: Sam, 33; Aquinnah, 28; Schuyler, 28; and Esmé, 21. He thinks that as horrible as Parkinson’s is, the illness gave Fox a better sense of what really matters. “Michael calls Parkinson’s ‘the gift that keeps on taking,’ and there’s something to that,” Guggenheim says. “Because there’s a clarity you get when you have this kind of horrible chronic diagnosis. There’s a kind of relentless degradation that comes with Parkinson’s. But what’s amazing about Michael is that all those falls and all those trips to the hospital could have turned him bitter. But, weirdly, it’s only made him more self-assured and openhearted.”

Guggenheim is right. I witnessed the resilience and decency he describes firsthand. In fact, I’m struck that the two times that I met with Fox, he made a point of standing up and walking toward me to shake my hand, despite the physical effort that requires. There’s something about that simple gesture that makes my throat catch. This, I thought at the time, is a really good guy.

Fox is very adroit at remaining upbeat and keeping things light during our time together. But watching him struggle to walk or control his wandering hands makes it clear how hard even the most mundane tasks are when you lose authority over your movements. I worry I’m being too personal or too lurid, but there’s something I want to ask Fox: How does Parkinson’s change your relationship to your body?

“That’s a good question,” Fox assures me. “I think about that all the time.” Sometimes, he says, he will catch himself in a mirror and see his unsteady walk or think about his slurred speech. “All these things together have become who I am and the way I present to the world,” he says.

But, Fox admits, he also thinks about how the medication he takes to dull those symptoms gives him a false idea of what Parkinson’s has done to him.

“When I first sat down and started talking to you, I knew it was going to take a minute for the pills to kick in and then it was going to be OK,” he tells me. “But what I have to understand is that if I take the pills and I feel better, that’s not real. If I don’t take them and feel like shit — that’s real. So the better I feel, the less real it is.”

For now, at least, there are plenty of reasons for Fox to feel proud of what he’s accomplished and excited for what’s to come. The release of “Still” will remind viewers of Fox’s determination to emerge from any ordeal stronger in the broken places. And he’s thrilled with the reaction to the film, which was greeted with glowing reviews and a standing ovation when it premiered at Sundance and screened at SXSW.

People think you’re a hero, I tell Fox. And I sense that makes him uncomfortable, even if he understands it.

“It’s just a nice way of people letting me know they are moved by my acceptance of things and by the way that I’ve tried to make a difference,” he says. “But no matter how much I sit here and talk to you about how I’ve philosophically accepted it and taken its weight, Parkinson’s is still kicking my ass. I won’t win at this. I will lose.”

“But,” Fox adds. “There’s plenty to be gained in the loss.”

Harrison Ford shares details on ‘extraordinary’ Michael J Fox’s Shrinking appearance

Michael J Fox will guest star in Apple TV’s hit comedy Shrinking, and Harrison Ford has now praised the actor for his “significant representation of human vigor”.

Speaking to HELLO!, Harrison said of the opportunity to work alongside the Back to the Future star: “It was an extraordinary experience – an extraordinary human experience – and a wonderful acting experience as well, but to have such a significant representation of human vigor and human capacity?”

Shrinking follows a grieving therapist (Jason Segel) who decides that he is going to start telling his clients exactly what he thinks of them, to varying levels of success.

The synopsis reads: “Ignoring his training and ethics, he finds himself making huge, tumultuous changes to people’s lives … including his own.”

Harrison’s character Dr Paul Rhoades is diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and hides it in the first season from his colleagues and family.

Season two sees Paul begin to come to terms with the diagnosis, and in season three Michael – who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s over 30 years ago – will guest star for an arc.

It marks the Canadian star’s first acting role since 2020.

Harrison, who was joined by his Shrinking castmates at the Television Academy’s inaugural Televerse Festival, continued: “The man is extraordinary, indomitable, and faces the challenges of this disease with such incredible capacity, it’s a life lesson.”

“The acting thing was a bonus,” he said.”But the experience itself was really such a treat and such an important experience. I really appreciate him doing it for us.”

© AFP via Getty Images

The show’s creator, Bill Lawrence, had previously revealed that Michael, whom he worked with in Spin City, was a major inspiration for Shrinking.

“I found the first mentor in my life and career, Michael J. Fox, to be so inspiring with the way he took it in stride and continues to work harder than anybody I know,” he told People. “And we want to kind of carry that spirit if we can into the show.”

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Michael was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 when he was 29.

He has become a fierce advocate for those living with the disease and has raised over $2 billion in funds for research.

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The 63-year-old’s latest memoir, Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum, was co-written by Nelle Fortenberry and will be released in October.

The highly anticipated book will cover his time filming Back to the Future and the hit TV series Family Ties simultaneously, during which time he would work on the former at night and the latter during the day. He will delve into what it was really like to film both projects at the same time, six years before his Parkinson’s diagnosis, which would eventually bring his career to a halt.

Michael J. Fox Makes Rare Appearance at 40th Anniversary Screening of Back to the Future

The movie was released on July 18, 1985

Michael J. Fox was feeling the power of love.

On Sunday, Aug. 10, Fox, 64, attended a 40th anniversary screening of Back to the Future at Southampton Playhouse in Southampton, N.Y. The event included a rare screening of the movie in IMAX, and afterward, Fox took part in a screening conversation moderated by Southampton Playhouse Artistic Director Eric Kohn.

The Back to the Future showing was part of the Playhouse’s ’80s Blockbuster Essentials screening series, which included The Terminator and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. On Instagram, the theater shared that they also had a DeLorean on site for fans to take photos with before the screening.

Back to the Future hit theaters on July 3, 1985. In addition to Fox as Marty McFly — a high school student who goes back in time and changes both his parents’ lives and his future — the movie also starred Christopher Lloyd as Emmett “Doc” Brown, Lea Thompson as Lorraine Baines-McFly, Crispin Glover as George McFly and Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen. The movie became a smash hit, bringing in over $380 million at the box office. It also won an Oscar, with four total nominations. Huey Lewis and the News’ song from the movie, “The Power of Love,” also became a No. 1 hit.

Back to the Future had two sequels: 1989’s Back to the Future Part II and 1990’s Back to the Future Part III. The film was also adapted into a 2023 Broadway musical.

Back in May, Fox announced that he’d be releasing a memoir, Future Boy, this fall. In the book, he’ll dive into when he was filming Back to the Future and his beloved sitcom Family Ties at the same time.

He told PEOPLE about that period of his life, “ ‘The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ I didn’t say that, Einstein did. I wonder if even Albert could make sense of my life in the first months of 1985, when time went rogue and took me with it. What was it like? In a word: busy.”

“As we approach the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, my thoughts turn to my adventures as a younger man,” he said. “This book has basically become a time machine for me, but unlike the DeLorean, there’s plenty of room for anyone who’d like to climb in for the ride.”

In Back to the Future, Fox as Marty plays a red ES-345 Gibson Guitar at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, rocking out with “Johnny B. Goode.” That guitar has been missing since filming wrapped, and Gibson launched a quest this summer to find it.

Michael J. Fox Reunites With His ‘Spin City’ Co-Star in Touching Photo

Fans of Michael J. Fox were feeling quite nostalgic on Aug. 27, after his former Spin City co-star, Heather Locklear, shared a meaningful photo of a recent reunion with the actor.

Locklear posted a photo of herself sitting next to Fox at the Toronto Fan Expo and leaning into the 64-year-old, with Fox putting his right arm around Locklear’s shoulders. The two smiled brightly at the camera as they enjoyed the charming moment. In the photo, Locklear looked elegant in a floral-print off-the-shoulder dress, while Fox looked chic in gray pants, a black shirt and a denim jacket.

Sharing the memory with fans, Locklear wrote over the photo, “With one of my all time favorites! Thank you Toronto Fan Expo.”

Fans loved seeing the photo of the former co-stars, with replies in the comments like, “Michael J Fox is all shades of fantastic. What a wonderful picture,” “Love this!” and “Two legends!!!”

“TV Royalty both,” declared someone else of Locklear and Fox, as a different fan replied, “Love this! You both look fabulous!!”

Another person reacted to the photo with the note, “Beautiful pic Heather. 2 television icons.”

Fox and Locklear Were Co-Stars in the ’90s Sitcom Spin City

Locklear and Fox starred together in the popular sitcom Spin City, which premiered in the fall of 1996 on ABC and aired until April 2002. In total, the show ran for six seasons and 145 episodes, although neither star was in the show for its entire run.

Fox left the series as the lead in 2000 due to his battle with Parkinson’s disease, while Locklear joined the show in 1999 and stayed on until it ended in 2002, with the two actors only overlapping on the show for a short time. Although Fox left the series after Season 4, he stayed on as executive producer until it ended.

Fox plays the main character, Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty of New York City, who works hard to save Mayor Randall Winston, played by Barry Bostwick, from any tough situation. Locklear joined the cast of Spin City in Season 4 as Caitlin Moore, a political strategist brought on to help Winston with his senatorial campaign, who often finds herself at odds with Flaherty.

Fox on Why He Left Spin City

In an interview Fox had with The New York Times in 2019, the actor opened up about everything he was going through when he decided to leave the hit sitcom. He noted how he would use intense facial expressions and movements in his acting, calling it “high-level muggery.”

“I could pull a face; I could do a double take. And one of the reasons I left Spin City was that I felt my face hardening,” he went on, before sharing a specific detail about his acting style that changed as a result of his Parkinson’s disease, saying, “If you watch episodes from the last couple of seasons, you’ll see I would anchor myself against a desk or the wall. Eventually it was too burdensome.”

Despite his ongoing health battle, Fox has continued to act over the years, with a highly anticipated role in the upcoming season of Shrinking.

Michael J. Fox makes rare appearance to celebrate ‘Back to the Future’ 40th anniversary

Fox reprised his role as teen Marty McFly, alongside Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown, in two more “Back to the Future” movies.

Lloyd, 86, has also continued to appear in films and TV shows, most recently the second season of “Wednesday” and “Hacks.” He made a rare public appearance alongside wife Lisa Loiacono at the Hollywood premiere of his latest project, the Bob Odenkirk-starring “Nobody 2,” on Aug. 11.

Michael J. Fox doesn’t ‘fear’ death

Since publicly revealing his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 1998 – seven years after his diagnosis – Fox has continued to act in Hollywood while also advocating for and funding Parkinson’s research through his foundation.

In January, President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom as he “warms hearts and captivates audiences as a fearless advocate for those with Parkinson’s disease.”

The fastest-growing neurodegenerative condition in the U.S., Parkinson’s is an incurable brain disorder, a progressive disease “that causes unintended or uncontrollable movements, such as shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination,” according to the National Institute on Aging.

Over the years, Fox has sustained multiple broken bones, including both arms, his shoulder, his orbital bone and cheek and his hand, which resulted in a serious infection.

Fox combats his symptoms, such as paralysis of his facial muscles, through medication and trains to preserve his ambulatory skills.

“One day I’ll run out of gas,” Fox told Town & Country magazine in 2023. “One day I’ll just say, ‘It’s not going to happen. I’m not going out today.’ If that comes, I’ll allow myself that.

“Certainly, if I were to pass away tomorrow, it would be premature, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. And so, no, I don’t fear that.”

Heather Locklear and Michael J. Fox reunite nearly 25 years after starring on ‘Spin City’

Nearly twenty-five years after they starred together on “Spin City,” Michael J. Fox and Heather Locklear had a reunion.

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On Wednesday, Locklear, 63, shared a photo on her Instagram of herself smiling with Fox, 64.

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Heather Locklear at the premiere of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: The Kristine Carlson Story” at the Orinda Theatre on October 14, 2021 in Orinda, California.

One fan posted a gif of Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd, 86) in Fox’s classic 1985 movie “Back To the Future,” exclaiming, “Great Scott!”

Another fan gushed, “This just makes my night. I loved you two in Spin City. This is awesome. So glad you guys had a good event together.”

A third fan said, “love the photo, you both look great.”

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Fox and the “Dynasty” actress last worked together on “Spin City.” The ABC sitcom ran from 1996 to 2002, set in a fictionalized version of the New York City mayor’s office.

Fox starred as Mike Flaherty, the Deputy Mayor of New York, while Locklear joined the show in its fourth  season as campaign manager Caitlin Moore.

After Fox revealed he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he left the series at the end of Season 4 in 2000, and Charlie Sheen became the show’s new lead for the last two seasons.

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During the 90s Con in Daytona Beach, Fla., last year, Locklear opened up about the difference between working with Fox and Sheen.

“The timing [difference] between Michael and Charlie I had to get used to. Michael is a fast guy, Charlie is mmmhmmm,” she said, according to People.

Due to their different acting styles, Locklear said she had to adjust her own talents to match her counterpart.

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“So [the challenge] was really having to get my timing better. They get to be who they are and I’d get to be … not who I am,” she noted.

Although Fox has taken fewer acting roles in recent years after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, he still appeared at some fan conventions and takes some TV roles, such as a guest stint on the AppleTV+ series “Shrinking,” in which Harrison Ford plays a character with Parkinson’s.

Fox will be in Season 3, which doesn’t have an announced premiere date, yet.

“Michael’s courage, his fortitude and his grace, more than anything else, is on full display,” Ford told the outlet.

The “Indiana Jones” star added about Fox: “He’s a very smart, very brave, noble, generous, passionate guy, and an example to all of us, whether we’re facing Parkinson’s or not. You cannot help but recognize how amazing it is to have such grace.”