Christopher Lloyd Recalls Disappointment at Back To The Future’s Marty McFly Recasting

For many fans of the Back To The Future franchise, the moment footage of Eric Stoltz’s version of Marty McFly was released, everyone agreed that it had been the right decision by Bob Gale and Robert Zemekis to do whatever it took to get their first choice actor Michael J. Fox into the role, one that turned out be a career defining moment for Fox and probably the saviour of the original 1985 movie. However, with Stoltz having filmed for weeks on the movie, the announcement that he was being replaced was questionable to of the film’s other stars, including Doc Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd.

There is no doubt that Back To The Future would have been a completely different movie if the original casting of Stoltz had remained. Although Fox had always been the first choice for the role, with circumstances around his TV schedule preventing him from accepting at the first time of asking, Lloyd recently recalled being disappointed at the change, and the challenges it brought him after spending time building a relationship with Stoltz. Speaking to GQ, Lloyd explained:

“There was another actor and Michael came in after we shot for six weeks. They just decided that they needed somebody with a comic flair, and Stoltz is a wonderful actor, I had no idea that change was coming. One night, we were shooting the mall, beginning sequence. We were all asked to come to one of the trailers at one-o’-clock in the morning and [producer Steven] Spielberg was there and made the announcement of the change. My biggest fear was that, because I was really working to get Doc right, that was the start. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I could get it up to do that again.’ I was worried about it, but it all worked out.”

Though it is evident that Lloyd and the new Marty McFly would have had a different chemistry, he really didn’t need worry about getting on with the young star. “Michael [and I], we had a chemistry which lasted the whole time. We could come back after a break and just be there, we didn’t have to work for it. So that was great.”

What Made Back to the Future Great?

There is no doubt that doing a time-travel based movie right takes a lot of effort, and there is no denying that the team behind Back To The Future managed to pull that off, even to the point where fans are still discovering some subtle differences made to the future by Marty McFly’s trip to 1955. Whether the movie would have been the success it was with Stoltz’s Marty McFly in the lead is something we will never know, but writer Bob Gale previously made it clear that he doesn’t think reviving the Back To The Future concept may ever be able to happen in the future.

“The thing that people don’t always understand about Back to the Future and what really makes it work, because people say, ‘Oh, let’s do a time travel series.’ Well, okay, time travel series are really hard to pull off,” Gale explained to ComicBook.com back in 2020. “Back to the Future works because it’s the story of this family, and time travel is an element of it, but you are totally with those characters. It’s a terrific dramatization of a moment that every human being has in their life, which is the moment when we’re kids and we suddenly realize, ‘Oh, my God, my parents were once kids, too.’ By the time you’re five or six years old, you look at your parents and they’re these God-like figures, and they don’t age, as far as you can tell. They must have always been there, and then suddenly, by the time you’re seven, eight, nine, you suddenly start putting it together, that, ‘My parents were once kids.’ That is the power of Back to the Future. It’s the human stuff. It’s not the logistics of traveling through time because, frankly, you look at a time travel series, both things that they’ve done on television and things that they’ve done in comic books, and they fall into this trap of using time travel as a plot mechanism.”

While it is true that time travel is one of those things that fascinates audiences and has been used in every genre from romantic comedies to action movies and even Marvel got in on the act in Avengers: Endgame, but whether Back To The Future will ever be remade … the question should really be, why would it need to be?

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