Key points
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Michael J. Fox said that he stepped back from acting in 2020 because his “ability to memorize lines” was fading.
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The Back to the Future star joined Shrinking because his character “allows me to show up on set as myself.”
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Fox also said working with Harrison Ford was “insanely fun.”
Michael J. Fox thought he was probably done with acting until Shrinkingcame along.
The Back to the Future star reflected on taking his first on-camera role in six years after stepping back from acting in 2020 due to Parkinson’s complications.
“A new variable emerged: my ability to memorize lines,” Fox told PEOPLE. “There’s a time for everything, and the time for 12-hour workdays was behind me.”
However, Fox said that Shrinking circumvented his physical challenges by folding them into his role. “This new character allows me to show up on set as myself,” he said, noting that he was able to “use how I feel on any given day and channel it into the scene.”
The Teen Wolf star’s last on-camera performance prior to Shrinking was a two-episode stint on The Good Fight in 2020. Fox previously said that his turn on that legal drama made him question his memorization skills.
“I’d have to read screeds of legalese. I couldn’t get it,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I had just seen one of my favorite movies, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and there was a great scene where Leo [DiCaprio] goes back in his room and just lays into himself in the mirror and just goes insane and drinking and crying at his lack of ability to memorize lines and I found myself, similarly, in front of a mirror and I went: Meh! I can’t do it. I can’t do this anymore.”
Fox told PEOPLE that it was “insanely fun” to work alongside Harrison Ford on the Apple TV dramedy, and Ford shared similar sentiments during a panel promoting the show in April.
“He is an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate, wise, gentle person, with great power,” Ford said of Fox. “He’s been very generous in extending friendship to me. I really didn’t know him, so I was a little nervous about meeting him. But he was so generous and kind to me that it gave me a degree of confidence, which is all you have to work with.”
Fox remains hopeful that his Michael J. Fox Foundation will help find a cure for his condition. “The Foundation’s work is about driving toward a world without Parkinson’s. We don’t know exactly when it’ll happen, but it will happen,” he told PEOPLE. “Science is hard. It’s astronomically expensive. It takes time and collaboration. But as long as we stay focused, we stay hopeful, we’ll get there. And the science is showing we’re getting close.”
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He added, “We’re seeing more research breakthroughs every year, new drugs to help patients live well, and better tools to help scientists move faster. It’s heartening progress. And we’re going to stay on it till the job is done.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
