Michael J Fox’s biggest regret from the best years of his career: “I was kind of an idiot”
In 1985, Michael J Fox was living the dream.
He’d started the year as one of the stars of Family Ties, one of the biggest shows on television. By the end of the year, he had also conquered the box office, with both Teen Wolf and Back to the Future having made mad money and lodging themselves firmly in popular culture to be referenced for ages. Fox was still in his mid-20s when he became one of the most recognisable faces on the planet, and this mammoth fame came with a price.
In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, the Canadian-born, taking a page straight out of Marty McFly’s playbook, reflected on this period and what he thought fame would look like. He imagined he’d look and feel like a rock star, someone like Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix, but that aspiration was quickly struck by the lightning whip of reality.
“But I wasn’t a rock star,” he explained, “I was kind of an idiot. I missed the point”. When asked what “the point” was, Fox answered, “That I had talent. That I had gotten where I was because I did something well. I was comfortable with the idea that I had won the lottery, and that made me less respectful of what talent I had. I’d be riding in a limo with my head out the sunroof and a beer in each hand, thinking, ‘Who expected this success from me?’… Obviously, on some level, that kind of popularity is all down to fate. But it also doesn’t happen to just anybody.”
It’s easy to understand why Fox might have felt like this. The entire reason he was in Back to the Future was because Robert Zemeckis sacked the original lead actor. Luck does play a major part in the success of any actor, in a profession so based on variables lining up. You have to be in the right place at the right time, but it takes a lot of hard graft to put yourself in that position.
Strangely, Fox credits a seemingly negative event with turning his life around. “In a way, Parkinson’s got my head in the game,” he continued, “I realised there are bigger things than being a rock star”. The actor was diagnosed with the degenerative disease in 1991, although he didn’t reveal it until 1998. The symptoms of this cruel illness forced him to step back from acting, as his schedule became more and more focused on guest appearances and voice work.
Fox wasn’t going to take his scenario lying down, though. He set up The Michael J Fox Foundation in the year 2000. The institute, which was founded to help find a cure for Parkinson’s, has raised over $2billion towards fighting the disease. While the quest for a cure continues, the Foundation did fund a study that discovered a key indicator of the condition in 2023.
Parkinson’s is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Fox could have let the disease overtake his entire life, but instead, he used it as an opportunity to reflect on his life up to that point and decide how he was going to spend the rest of his days going forward. Karma rewarded his positive attitude and charitable outlook with heartily, following what could have been a career-ending diagnosis, which allowed him to be able to return to acting in 2025 after five years away; a beautiful moment for a real-life superhero.
