The Fantastic Mr Fox

Being a career interview with Michael J. Fox, for my money the finest light-comic actor of his generation. First published in Empire Magazine, 2015

In 1982 when Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s soon-to-be legendary head of entertainment - a man whose televisual genius was exemplified by his once scribbling the words ‘MTV Cops’ on a scrap of paper and handing it to an underling (Miami Vice was the result) – was presented with one Mike Fox as the potential star of his new sitcom Family Ties, he was deeply sceptical. “Look,” he told the show’s producer Gary David Goldberg, “I just don’t see that kid’s face on any lunchboxes.” A decade or so later, after Family Ties had turned out to be a ratings and awards juggernaut, and its diminutive star one of the defining movie stars of the era, he received a package in the post. Inside was a lunchbox plastered with Fox’s grinning mug. “This is to put your crow in,” read the note.

The sender, by then Michael J. Fox – the initial having been inserted on the say-so of the American Actors’ Union and in homage to an early hero character actor Michael J. Pollard – had reason for a little crowing of his own. About a gallon and a half of charm, vanilla sex appeal and precision comic timing decanted into a half-pint pot, he was by then one of the biggest stars on the planet. Back To The Future, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s gleaming combination of modish 80s style and 50s nostalgia, had given him global box-office appeal, but determined attempts to escape from the clean-cut latter-day Mickey Rooney persona that numerous seasons playing Family Ties’ Reaganite teen Alex P. Keaton and three outings as Marty McFly had forged for him proved to have variable success. Paul Schrader’s almost forgotten Light of Day (1987) was a brave if underpowered attempt at blue-collar verisimilitude mismarketed as a rock and roll movie. John Badham’s buddy cop movie The Hard Way (1991), a neglected minor gem which had him as a self-obsessed movie star shadowing James Wood’s hard-bitten New York detective, riffed on movies within movies with infinitely more zest than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero did a couple of years later, but it turned out, with an equal lack of interest from audiences. Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), the best of the 90s Vietnam cycle, was warmly received critically, but less so at the box office and Bright Lights Big City (1988), despite an impressive performance by Fox and beautiful cinematography from the Prince of Darkness himself Gordon Willis, foundered on his audience’s unwillingness to accept their time-travelling pinup as coke-addled twentysomething negotiating an early-life crisis.

By the mid-90s there was a sense that Fox would need a time machine of his own to re-establish the that was becoming as dated as burgundy body-warmers and aviator shades.

And one duly arrived. Or rather one and a half. As a motor-mouthed Presidential aide in The American President (1995) Fox reminded audiences of the dextrous amalgam of easy charm and stiletto comic delivery of which he was a past master. And then an up-and-coming antipodean director Peter Jackson hoved into view with a screenplay he thought might be perfect for Fox. The Frighteners succeeded in finally marrying Fox’s indubitable talent for comedy with a darker edge and introduced him to an appreciative new generation of moviegoers. He seemed positioned for the mother of all celluloid comebacks.

It didn’t happen. Instead, he performed an abrupt volte-face and waved goodbye to Hollywood, seemingly for good, returning to the bosom of television with Spin City, a smart, successful sitcom that may as well have been titled ‘What Alex Did Next’. The reason: the early onset Parkinson’s disease that had been diagnosed during the production of Doc Hollywood in 1991 when he was just 29 was making its symptoms felt, and it would send his career spinning off back not only back into television but into real-life politics as a passionate and occasionally controversial advocate for stem-cell research. Empire chatted to him from his office in New York.

How are you?

I’m good. Sorry about cancelling yesterday. I was having a bad day and it would have been diminishing returns.

No problem. Was film a big part of your life as a kid?

Yeah, I went to the movies a lot. My earliest memories are of Planet of the Apes movies, I had a love of science fiction. As I got older I saw movies like The Dirty Dozen. And at that age my heroes were James Cagney and Clint Eastwood. I loved Hang 'em’ High and Josey Wales and The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

Was it a case of wanting to be like those guys?

I didn’t think of modelling myself after someone. Back then I wanted to be 18 with a union card. And I don’t mean an actors’ union card. I mean working on the docks or something. And I had no real role models, I had nobody’s path that I was set to follow. [Pauses] But now you’ve got me thinking about when I was a kid, my mom sent me to the store to get some washing detergent. And I would run across the park of the mall with the theme to Mission: Impossible playing in my head. I was dodging bad guys. I had it in my head that there were these villains who were going to capture me and torture me for information on where this washing detergent was. So film and acting and my imaginative predisposition maybe were a good match. Then at 18 I did what you’re not supposed to do. I sold my car and went down to the States.

That's a big risk . . .

It was stupid optimism. It was just blind, ignorant faith.

How confident were you that you could make it?

I was blissfully ignorant. That was really what it was. I didn’t entertain the notion that it wouldn’t work. To this day I have an expression that drives my kids crazy. ‘Anytime you obsess about the worst case scenario and it happens, you’ve lived it twice’. So I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong.

It must have been a bit baffling for your parents . . .

My dad was really cool. To his way of thinking, whether he understood it or not, this was a vocation not an avocation and I was by then earning a living. His line to me was ‘if you’re going to be a lumberjack you might as well go to the goddamned forest’. So he agreed to take me down to California and so we drove down in his car and took turns at driving. I remember it was April of '79. I auditioned for a Disney film called Midnight Madness and got it. So when we drove back up to BC from California I had a job which I returned to do in June. So he was able to put aside his trepidation and his doubts just because he knew that he couldn’t have an argument about what I was trying to do because it was panning out.

When did you realise that people seemed to warm to you personally?

I was always affable. And always I think I was an optimistic kid. The people I looked up to were funny people and approachable people. I wasn't fascinated by dark misanthropic, nihilistic anti-heroes. Having said that I liked Cagney and Clint Eastwood, but I just knew that as people I wasn’t drawn to assholes. And it’s a good defence when you’re an undersized guy. You make friends. You make love not war because the odds are against you in warfare. I just didn’t have the size or the temperament to be at war with the world. So I tend to look on the bright side.

But things didn't go so well in LA? The story goes you sold your furniture . . .

If I was American it would have gone great because I would have been able to augment my gigs with regular employment as a waiter or a busboy. But I didn’t have the immigrant status to do it. I ended up literally selling my furniture section by section. It sounds like an apocryphal story but it’s actually true. I was selling it to an actor who was living in my building whose career was ascending while mine was descending. Which made it all the worse. By the time I got Family Ties I was really thinking about going back to Canada, but I had a tax bill that I had to pay and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get back in because I had this tax bill. And it was just a messy situation for 19-year-old to find themselves in.

Had Family Ties not happened would you have given up?

Yeah, it really was eleventh hour. Which now makes it a better story but at the time it was really terrifying.

Teen Wolf was your first lead in a movie. It really rode the growing success of Family Ties . . .

Under other circumstances maybe it was one of those things I might not have done. But it led to other things. I was sitting in my trailer on Teen Wolf and I had plastic foam glued to my face and I was covered in yak hair and I couldn’t eat so I was drinking my lunch out of a straw. We were shooting on location in Pasadena. It was hot and miserable. And I’d heard that there were some location scouts on the set from a Steven Spielberg movie. I remember thinking, ‘Shit, here I am sitting with yak hair all over me. My career is over before its even started out.’ What I didn’t realise that already I had been offered this film but Gary had not told me about it because there was no way I could be available and do the show at the same time. And he didn't want to break my heart.

It turned out to be Back To The Future which was a career maker . . .

Absolutely. They had shot for three weeks with Eric Stoltz, and decided that that wasn’t the way they wanted to go and then they went back to Gary and said ‘Is there any way now you can let him out?’ So Gary, he just couldn't do it to me twice. He said he’d be willing to let me do it if I liked the script and if I worked on both shows at the same time. He gave me the script in a manilla envelope and said ‘Take it home and read it and come back and I’ll tell Bob and Steven what you’ve decided. And I picked it up and kind of held it for a couple of seconds and then put it back on the desk and said ‘I’m in. I love the thing.’ By that weekend I was at a beach house in Malibu talking to Bob and Steven and Kathleen Kennedy and deciding how we could do this. And a couple of days later I was in a parking lot with flames running through my legs.

Did you realize you were making something that would be special?

No, I didn't. I was convinced that I sucked. I couldn’t get any kind of objectivity about it. But I was just living from beat to beat. I happened to be in London doing a Family Ties TV special and when they started previewing the film. When my agent called my first response was ‘Look, I promise I’ll do better next time’. And she said ‘No it’s amazing. You’re not going to believe it!’

When did you realise just how big this was going to be?

It was probably in Venice at the Venice film festival. Actually I’ve never told this story but after the movie screened and everybody was crazy for it and I went out partying that night and I met a paparazzi girl. And had this great wild night. And she ended up staying over in my room. I woke up and opened the door and there were dozens of paparazzi outside my room. It was crazy. here I am overlooking the lido, I got a girl in my room and the paparazzi at the door. Life just went nuts.

You were living the life for a few years? Did you buy into being a movie star thing?

I don’t know if ‘buying into’ is the right term. I just experienced it. I just let it take me where it took me. You can’t help but feel, ‘Wow! this is so improbable. How can anyone deserve this?’ I mean you can say you’ve earned it. But no level of ratio to reward is appropriate in this instance. To have the world at your feet just for being able to set aside your own psyche for a few minutes and with some amount of charm or elegance or energy portray another person. For that you get to meet kings and queens and travel around the world on private jets and have a car for every day of the week.

Do you feel lucky this happened then rather than now in the era of TMZ and camera phones?

Oh man! I’m so grateful. I mean I used to get out of a bar and leave my troops behind. You just couldn't do that now. It would have been a mess. And it just feeds itself. I mean I’m not happy saying names but you see young people that don’t do it so gracefully. What ultimately saved me was my parents having instilled certain kinds of corrective behaviours growing up. And they didn't allow me to be a complete asshole. I would have reached this point where I had to face them with it. They were cool with the partying, they could abide the craziness that they saw. But they wouldn't have been able to abide me being mean or disrespectful to people, to people who were not perhaps in as privileged a position as me. Bullying waiters or something like that. In the long run, I think that contained me because in the long run I could never be fully invested in my supposed superiority and my being more important than anyone else.

Were you trying to escape the clean-cut thing. For instance you did Light of Day with Paul Schrader...

I was interested in trying to become a better actor and didn’t want to do just the same thing over and over again. So when I made those movies, I wasn’t trying to change any perception of me. I was just I don't know long before I’m out of here and I want to have as many different experiences as I can and make as many different kinds of films as I can. Some of them worked, and are better than people give the credit for and some of them didn’t.

One of these films that is better than people perhaps remember is Bright Lights Big City . . .

Well, that film, we had the issue, we started with a director who we let go about three weeks in. And so it was picked up and we used some of that footage and didn’t use some of the rest. But I have a fascination with how people become lost in the looking glass. How actually in that movie it wasn't being lost in the looking glass, it was the looking glass lying on the table covered with white powder. It’s funny I never thought of that back then. It would have been a good soundbite [laughs]. Casualties of War was a movie that I thought was really great. That came out in the Summer of 88. I remember very distinctly there was a big critics ad in the middle of the New York Times and over the fold was the fold was the review ad for Honey I Shrunk the kids and below the fold was the review as for our movie: ‘a gripping and terrifying journey into hell. It’ll make you shit blood. I thought ‘we’re doomed.’ [Laughs]

What was Brian De Palma like?

He was always great to me. He is very rigid idea of what he wants to do. He does these long Steadicam shots so everything’s very constructed and that can be off-putting to actors because they don’t see how they fit it. But actually within that structure there is a freedom to do what you want to do, knowing that he’s doing his bit to power this narrative by what he’s showing the audience. I remember there was a scene where I was walking to the latrine and I was going to be blown up in the bathroom. And we had this conversation about the character being as heroic as we could make him because he was in effect a snitch, which is a hard thing to sell in America, even though it was a film about a girl being raped. It was tricky. So he came back to me with this roll of toilet paper, I was walking towards the latrine where I’m going to be blown up with a roll of asswipe and this made it even less heroic and so he looked at it and said ‘you’re right’ and we shut down for a day while they rewrote the scene. When he did that I knew that he was all in for actors.

Talking of Bright Lights, Hollywood then was a cocaine blizzard? Did any land on you?

I was so into alcohol that I didn’t get caught up in that. I was in a big boozing crowd with a lot of ex-pat Canadians. We were just into beer and Irish whisky. It didn’t affect me.

Did you know when you made it that The Frighteners would be your last studio movie?

Unbeknownst to many people I was a few years into my Parkinson's diagnosis when I got that screenplay. I was up in Vermont with my family and Bob Zemeckis came to me and asked if I wanted to do this. The script was still on pink pages. And he said well the filmmaker’s going to be up in Toronto for the festival, would I fly up and meet him? Heavenly Creatures was being shown there. And I saw the film with Peter Jackson and I loved it and just know that I wanted to work with him. It was the last feature I starred in mainly because I realised that I really couldn't be away from home for that long again. If I did a TV show in New York I could be with my family. I went out on a good note. I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to work with the Parkinson’s and if I continued to do films I didn’t know where they would take me. I would be away from my kids growing up, so having made that decision it was a really cathartic and seminal experience for me doing that film.

What were your impressions of Peter Jackson?

I remember my son had come out to New Zealand to visit. Fran and Pete had this table in his basement that was just full of these models and sculptures. It was Godzilla and The Mummy and King Kong. Just all these great models and my son was just blown away by it, he

wanted to stay all day. He still talks about that to this day. Peter was just like that. This cherubic big kid. A kind of wizard.

He was starting to single-handedly build an empire down there . . .

I’d be interested to see how the industry has changed down there because of what Peter’s been able to accomplish. Then it was still a very mom-and-pop operation then. It was very grassroots. He was imbued with that New Zealand quality of there being no tall poppies, we’re all part of the same production and all equal on it. And I remember thinking well that’s really sweet. But it’s not true. Because we’ve got this genius guy in the middle of it. I remember driving back to my house, it was pouring with rain a really miserable night. This was the middle of Winter, late July. And there was Peter, who had a cold already, and he’s walking down the road in the rain. I pulled over and picked him up. I was kind of pissed about it. I remember saying on the set the next day, you can talk about us all being equal all you want but if this guy gets pneumonia we're screwed. His talent was so evident though. You knew with him that he was going to do amazing things. You saw his imagination pulling the best from everybody around him. It was no coincidence to me that Bob Zemeckis had brought me into this, because he was kind of like Bob and by extension like Steven. He was at that level of talent.

Did you ever regret leaving movies?

No. I was really happy with TV. I had such physical challenges that I was having to deal with. In fact I manage much better now than I did then. I could more readily make films now than I could back then. But I was becoming exhausted and I wanted my kids to be centred and to be local to my family. And also to return to a medium that I still had a lot of love for. In the same way that Frighteners was working with Bob again, although Peter was directing, here I was working with Gary Goldberg again. Although it got complicated with Gary after a while. But life unfolds. I’m still open to other possibilities. I have a lot of fun now showing up on a show called Good Wife. If the right film came and the right filmmaker showed up I would be very open to it. I don’t seek it out. I don’t campaign. But if the right thing came by I’d certainly be open to it. But I’m happy with the way things are going.