Michael J. Fox Makes Triumphant Return to Acting in Hit Show

Five-time Emmy winner and Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox is making a return to the screen.

Fox will have a major guest-starring role in the third season of Shrinking, Apple TV+’s hit comedy starring Harrison Ford and Jason Segel.

Plot details around Fox’s character arc are still a mystery, but it’s likely that it connects to Ford’s character Paul Rhodes. At the end of season one, Rhodes gets a Parkinson’s diagnosis—a disease that Fox has been managing in real life for over three decades now.

It’s not the first time Fox has worked with Shrinking creator Bill Lawrence. The actor was the star of ABC comedy Spin City in 2000, which was the first series Lawrence created. For his role in the sitcom, Fox won his fifth Emmy award; his first four awards came in the 80s for his role as Alex P. Keaton in the long-running NBC sitcom Family Ties.

It’s also not the first time Fox has been seen on Apple TV+, as a documentary about his life entitled Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie aired on the streamer in 2023.

Fox retired from acting in 2020 due to complications with living with Parkinson’s on a day-to-day basis.

A page from his 2020 memoir, No Time Like the Future, says “not being able to speak reliably is a game-breaker for an actor” and that there’s “time for everything, and my time of putting in a 12-hour workday, and memorizing seven pages of dialogue, is best behind me…I enter a second retirement. That could change, because everything changes. But if this is the end of my acting career, so be it.”