The one role Christopher Lloyd has always wanted to play: “A fabulous character”
Somehow, possibly due to a problem with the space-time continuum, it is now 40 years since the release of Back to the Future, the 1985 movie that many, your writer included, consider to be essentially the perfect film.
And at the heart of that film is one of the greatest comedic performances in big screen history, from Christopher Lloyd, as the madcap scientist Dr Emmett Lathrop Brown.
Although Lloyd had been a successful actor before the filming of Robert Zemeckis’ classic ‘80s time travel romp, mostly in the much-loved sitcom Taxi alongside Danny Devito, it was without doubt his role opposite MIchael J Fox that put him on the map, and kept him there, forever known as Doc Brown to an ever growing fanbase of millions.
Watching the movie back for around the hundredth time or so, you are struck by how Lloyd powers the story forward, his energy and the enthusiasm he brings to every scene he’s in, dragging you further into the world of wacky science and possibility – as though he’s reaching through the screen and pulling you by the hand to come on the adventure.
Now 86, Lloyd is delighted at the love and obsession still displayed around the world toward the film and is under no illusions that it is Doc Brown that he will be forever remembered for. Just this month, he told Forbes, “Well, one thing that stands out with the Back to the Future trilogy, more than any other movie I’ve done, is how deeply it has affected people. I mean, kids who have grown up on it – adults – it’s touched them in a way that’s quite profound and sort of joyous.”
And Lloyd has done other movies, let’s not forget that. Aside from a fairly terrifying-for-kids turn in the semi-animated cracker Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he also played Uncle Fester in two Addams Family movies in the early 1990s and went on to do hundreds of guest spots and voice-overs in the following three decades.
Then in 2021, he was cast in the word-of-mouth hit Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk, the story of a long-retired assassin turned family man who is forced to come out of retirement and go full-on vigilante at a particularly nasty crime gang. It was a huge hit with audiences, especially on streaming services, and Lloyd played Odenkirk’s father, a retired FBI agent.
So successful was the film that this year a sequel hit cinemas as Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell takes his long-suffering family to a theme park with predictably punchy results. Lloyd returns too, and on co-starring with the Better Call Saul star he says: “I love working with him. He’s great – he’s so experienced and he’s loose. He has a great imagination, vigor, and he just likes to get in and do it.”
Despite all his superb character work over the last fifty years, however, there is one role Lloyd has never played – but would love to. And that is Don Quixote, the hero of a Spanish novel first published back in 1605 and considered to be the first example of a novel structured in the modern way.
The story of a nobleman who reads so many books of chivalry and romance that he decides he has to be a princess-saving knight, it was initially adapted for the big screen in 1947 in Spain and has since been made countless times in different genres, including animation, comedy and drama.
Explained Lloyd: “Well, I’ve always had a yearning, a real daydream of Don Quixote de La Mancha. I think that’s a fabulous character. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a reality – but yeah, he’s extraordinary. I’d love to play him.”
Meanwhile, Back to the Future will be back on the big screen this October, in IMAX no less, to celebrate 40 years since its release.
