People Were Choking Back Tears After Michael J. Fox And Christopher Lloyd Teamed Up For A ‘Back To The Future’ Reunion

You’re not going to get a Back to the Future reboot anytime soon, which is okay, because there’s always Rick and Morty. But on Saturday, fans got something even better: They got to see a very moving reunion between the two original stars.

At New York Comic Con on Saturday, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd joined each other on stage, hugging it out and fielding questions from the audience. One thing they discussed was one of the bigger elephants in the room: that Fox wasn’t the first person to play time traveling teenager Marty McFly. Eric Stoltz spent several weeks in the role before director Robert Zemeckis and team realized he wasn’t right for the part. They fired him and were able to work around Fox’s Family Ties schedule to film what wound up his most famous role.

“I didn’t know Michael other than hearing about him,” Lloyd told the crowd. “And I felt that I had barely made it through the six weeks, and now I was going to have to do it again?” Luckily they clicked. “There was immediate chemistry, as they say.”

Fox, meanwhile, praised Lloyd as “the king of exposition,” for the way he’s able to make boring dialogue sound exciting. “No one wants to do exposition because it’s boring…The freaking thing is you retain it all, because he’s just so good at it, and he’s brilliantly entertaining… I would be like, ‘I gotta watch my ass, because this guy will blow me off the screen.’”

They also discussed Fox’s condition: He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the early ‘90s but it didn’t start impacting his career until years later. By 2000, he’d launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation, to help fund research. He retired from acting in 2020, saying he’d lost his short-term memory.

“Parkinson’s is the gift that keeps on taking—but it’s a gift, and I wouldn’t change it for anything,” Fox said. “People like Chris have been there a lot for me, and so many of you have. It’s not about what I have, it’s about what I’ve been given—the voice to get this done, and help people out.”

The reunion earned a lot of love, especially due to Fox’s condition.

It’s not the first time Fox and Lloyd have reunited since the franchise ended all the way back in 1990. In 2016, they dug up Marty and Doc Brown once more for Jimmy Kimmel, which you can watch below.

(Via The AV Club)