Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, about a year after he began noticing symptoms. In his new Apple TV+ documentary, the Back to the Future star said he felt something was wrong for the first time after a night out with Woody Harrelson. The Doc Hollywood co-stars have been friends for decades.
“I woke up with a ferocious hangover… I noticed my pinky, auto-animated. For Christ’s sake, it’s just your freaking finger. But it wasn’t mine. S—. It was somebody else’s,” Fox said in Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, via Entertainment Tonight. “Had I hit my head? The tape of the previous night’s events was grainy at best. Woody Harrelson was in the bar the night before. Maybe we’d had one of our legendary drunken fights? But I couldn’t recall any such melee.”
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Fox remembered that his bodyguard needed to prop him up against a doorframe while searching for the keys to the actor’s suite. “But I didn’t feel any bumps. F—,” he continued. “In the face of all evidence to the contrary, I was in an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity. The trembling was a message.”
The trembling Fox felt came at the height of his career. Family Ties was just ending, and the Back to the Future sequels hit theaters in 1989 and 1990. He was only 29 when a neurologist told him he had Parkinson’s disease. “I said, ‘You know who you’re talking to, right? I’m not someone who’s supposed to get this,’” Fox recalled.
The neurologist told Fox the disease was incurable. “He said, ‘You lose this. You lose this game. You don’t win this,’”Fox said. His world “blew up,” he said. “I should’ve seen it coming, the cosmic price I had to pay for all my success.”
Fox refused to let go of his “fantasies of escape,” he said, even with his wife, Tracy Pollan, by his side. While making movies and shows, he would hold objects to mask tremors, but this only exacerbated his symptoms. He began drinking to “escape” his situation and became an alcoholic, Fox said. He got sober, but “as low alcohol had brought me, abstinence would bring me lower,” as there was no longer an escape.
The actor did not tell the public about his Parkinson’s diagnosis until 1998. He was starring on Spin City at the time, and his symptoms became impossible to hide. Fox, 61, was worried about how the public would respond, but he soon found out people still loved him. “I was still me people recognized… just me plus Parkinson’s,” he said.
Although Fox usually puts his positive attitude on display in public, he was more introspective in Still. “My world is getting smaller,” he told the cameras. “I love my mind and I love the place it takes me. I just don’t want that to get cut short.”
Fox also became a fierce advocate for Parkinson’s disease research. The Michael J. Fox Foundation has raised over $2 billion for the cause. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award last year, with none other than Harrelson presenting Fox with the award. “He never asked for the role of Parkinson’s advocate, but it is his best performance,” Harrelson said of his friend. “Michael J. Fox sets the ultimate example of how to fight and how to live.”
