As cinema legend has it, six weeks into the Back to the Future shoot, Eric Stoltz was abruptly replaced as Marty McFly by Michael J. Fox. It’s a fated moment in Hollywood history that Fox talks more about in his new memoir, Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum, which he co-wrote with Nelle Fortenberry.
In a chat with Entertainment Weekly that also includes book excerpts, Fox and Fortenberry described the way the studio initially tried to cover up the Fox-Stoltz swap, which was more amicable than the story we all thought we knew. But of course, even before the internet, things got messy. Fox revealed that at the time of the shoot, he didn’t really think about it. “I don’t think the public were aware of it until we were doing it. I was rushed on it, six weeks in, and I had no kind of time to talk about it.”
Fortenberry added more context: “They managed to keep the fact that Eric had left the movie and Michael was coming on the movie a secret until Michael started.” Then, things got blown out of proportion when the news dropped, “announcing that it had taken place, and it called the movie ‘troubled.’ ‘The troubled production of Back to the Future.‘ So I think a lot of people in the business thought, ‘Oh, this must be a mess. This is just a hot mess, this movie.'”
Fox described the surreal experience of jumping into the shoot with his castmates, including Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson. “They all had shot for six weeks. So they had stuff in the can where they had been acting with [another] actor. I had no past with it. I had no history with it, but I just jumped in and did it.”
In Future Boy, Fox recalled, “Until my deal was locked in, Bob Zemeckis and his cowriter and producer, Bob Gale, continued filming with Eric Stoltz, who was unaware of the impending change. [Producer Steven Spielberg] was afraid that if they let him go prematurely and production shut down, the whole film could implode. Universal needed assurance that a plan was in place for a seamless transition to a new lead actor.”
Ultimately, the decision came down to the tone Stoltz leaned into with his version of Marty; it just didn’t fit with what the filmmakers had in mind. Fox explained to EW, “The thing that Eric did was just a different take,” he explained. “It had a little more Shakespeare, a little more tragedy. And I was doing all that I had in my wheelhouse, I didn’t have that tragedy. So I played what I knew.” The end result, of course, was an earnestly bewildered but spunky take on the role that would make the actor a beloved icon in sci-fi film history.
But there’s no bad blood between the two, as Fox detailed in the book. “What transpired on Back to the Future had not made us enemies or fated rivals; we were just two dedicated actors who had poured equal amounts of energy into the same role,” Fox said of his relationship with Stoltz. “The rest had nothing to do with us. As it turned out, we had much more in common than our spin as Marty.”
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