Although Michael J. Fox can’t actually go back in time, the actor found a way to move forward after replacing Eric Stoltz for his breakout movie role.
In his new memoir Future Boy, now available, the 4x Golden Globe winner revealed he has “maintained a friendly correspondence” with Stoltz, who was originally cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future (1985) before the role was recast with Fox, six weeks into filming.
“Eric has maintained his silence on the subject for forty years, so I was prepared for the likelihood that he’d prefer to keep it that way,” wrote Fox, according to Entertainment Weekly, noting that he penned in a letter to Stoltz: “If your answer is ‘piss off and leave me alone’…that works, too.”
Fox said that the Some Kind of Wonderful actor’s “beautifully written reply began, ‘Piss off and leave me alone!’ Thankfully, this was 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.”
The Teen Wolf star said he and Stoltz “immediately fell into an easy dialogue about our careers, families, and yes, our own trips through the space-time continuum.”
Stoltz greeted Fox for the first time “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.”
Fox added that “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. His emails are reliably witty and always fun to read.”
After playing Marty McFly in Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 time-travel comedy, Fox reprised the role in Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Part III (1990).
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