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Returning to set to work on camera for the first time in five years, Michael J. Fox was in full flight as a guest star in Season 3 of Apple TV+ sitcom Shrinking.
“I loved seeing everybody still flabbergasted by Fox’s timing,” show co-creator Bill Lawrence said at an Emmy: For Your Consideration event in Los Angeles on May 18. “Because his comedic timing is just bananas to this day.”
Fox, 64, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 29 in 1991 – the year after he completed the Back to the Future trilogy – surely impressed his scene partner, Harrison Ford, who plays a therapist living with Parkinson’s.
“He’s an incredibly powerful presence,” Ford, 82, added at the event. “Although he’s physically debilitated, his wit and his intelligence are fully intact. He’s wonderful to deal with. He’s courageous and purposeful about where he uses his energy.”
Fox has not acted on camera since 2020 and his role in TV’s The Good Fight. “There is a time for everything, and my time of putting in a 12-hour workday and memorising seven pages of dialogue, is best behind me,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality.
“In fairness to myself and to producers, directors, editors and poor beleaguered script supervisors, not to mention actors who enjoy a little pace, I enter a second retirement,” he continued. “That could change, because everything changes. But if this is the end of my acting career, so be it.”
Fox hinted there might be more to come at the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s A Country Thing Happened on the Way to Cure Parkinson’s event in April 2024 in Nashville. “If someone offers me a part and I do it and I have a good time, great,” he said. “I would do acting if something came up that I could put my realities into it, my challenges if I could figure it out.”
Lawrence, whose father has Parkinson’s, has said that Fox was an inspiration when he co-created Shrinking. “I found the first mentor in my life and career, Michael J. Fox, to be so inspiring with the way he took it in stride and continues to work harder than anybody I know,” Lawrence said in December. “And we want to kind of carry that spirit if we can into the show.”
Fox and Lawrence first worked together in 1996 on Spin City, which earned Fox four Emmy nominations, including one win, for his role as New York’s deputy mayor. After the 1999–2000 season, Fox was replaced by Charlie Sheen, who remained until the series ended in 2002. “One of the reasons I left Spin City was that I felt my face hardening,” Fox told The New York Times in 2019. “If you watch episodes from [my] last couple of seasons, you’ll see I would anchor myself against a desk or the wall. Eventually it was too burdensome. So I left.”
Fox continued to act in guest roles – as an OCD doctor on Scrubs and as himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm – but dialling back his on-camera career allowed him to raise over $1.5 billion for Parkinson’s research while clocking quality time with his family, wife Tracy Pollan and their kids, Sam, 36, Aquinnah, 30, Schuyler, 30, and Esmé, 23.
“I recognise how hard this is for people, and I recognise how hard it is for me,” Fox said on US TV’s Sunday Morning in 2023 of how he maintains a positive outlook. “But I have a certain set of skills that allow me to deal with this stuff. And I realise, with gratitude, optimism is sustainable. And if you can find something to be grateful for, then you can find something to look forward to, and you carry on.”
