Hollywood is littered with stories of projects that could have been, if a character had been cast differently. One of the most notable examples is Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly for six weeks in Robert Zemeckis’ “Back to the Future,” only to be recast with Michael J. Fox. This sparked a decades-old rumor that Stoltz resented Fox.
In his recent memoir “Future Boy,” Fox recounts meeting Stoltz for the first time, 40 years after the recasting.
Zemeckis originally wanted Fox for the role, but his commitments to NBC’s “Family Ties” prevented him from doing the film. A month and a half of filming with Stoltz (“Some Kind of Wonderful“) led to some disappointing dailies for the creative team. Around the same time, Fox was able to work out doing the film, and the rest is history.
Surprisingly, the two actors had never actually met.
“Eric has maintained his silence on the subject for 40 years, so I was prepared for the likelihood that he’d prefer to keep it that way,” Fox wrote. “If your answer is ‘piss off and leave me alone’… That works, too.”
Stoltz Responds
Stoltz responded to Fox’s letter with a “beautifully written reply” that “began, ‘Piss off and leave me alone!’ Immediately followed by: ‘I jest…’ Eric was thoughtful about my outreach, and although he respectfully declined to participate in the book, he seemed open to the idea of getting together.”
It took a while for the two to arrange a meeting. But when they did, they “immediately fell into an easy dialogue about our careers, families, and yes, our own trips through the space-time continuum,” Fox wrote. “[Stoltz entered] with a smile, and we quickly acknowledged that neither of us had an issue with the other. 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. The rest had nothing to do with us. As it turned out, we had much more in common than our spin as Marty.”
“In the months since meeting, Eric and I have maintained a friendly correspondence – volleys back and forth between like-minded actors and dads, offering up recent movies we’ve loved, the latest adventures with our kids and an occasional detour into politics,” he adds. “His emails are reliably witty and always fun to read [and] a reminder that some of the best parts of our future can come from the past.”
“Eric was an immensely talented actor, but the creative team felt that he just wasn’t the right fit for Marty McFly,” Fox explains.
You can grab your copy of Fox’s “Future Boy” here.
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