‘I am not the story,” says Michael J Fox, kind, and firm and, for the only time in our conversation, unpersuasive. “The story is the power of optimism. That it’s really a choice. Acceptance doesn’t mean being resigned to something. You look at it and say: ‘What does this truth require of me?’”
He leans over for a sip of Diet Coke. “It’s like with our glorious ex-president: the only answer to that is truth. You can get caught up in the mythology being presented. In the nativism and the hatred, the resentment and the foulness of it all. It’ll consume you. So you have to fight this stuff.”
Hang on, I say: in terms of Donald Trump, isn’t truth losing the battle? “I don’t think that we will go down that path. I think he’s in the back stretch and he’s gaining speed. What’s important is that we keep reminding ourselves who we are. I think we’ll prevail. But the world now is not pretty.”
Fox is speaking from his office in Los Angeles. Assistants mill in the blurred background. He hovers centre-screen: chestnut hair, greying stubble, still a whisper of pixie to those neat features, despite his 62 years, more than half of them lived with Parkinson’s.
Fox’s story – and he is the story – is one hell of a tale. Cute Canadian titch quits school, moves to Los Angeles, dumpster-dives for food, then lands the role of a yuppie teen on the smash sitcom Family Ties. Superstardom is sealed by Back to the Future. By August 1985, he has the US’s No 1 film in cinemas, and the No 2 (Teen Wolf), and the biggest TV show. He is on every magazine cover, every chatshow, every bedroom wall.
He headlines more movies – The Secret of My Success, The Hard Way, Casualties of War – and marries his Family Ties love interest, Tracy Pollan. One day in 1989, his little finger begins to twitch. Aged 29, he is told he has Parkinson’s. Usual life expectancy: 10-20 years.
Fox hits the bottle. He goes awol on overseas film sets until Pollan tells him she has no interest in raising children with an alcoholic. He cleans up, sorts another sitcom (Spin City) to fit between breakfast and bath time, and, in 1998, goes public with his diagnosis. In 2000, he sets up the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (called PD Cure until Pollan queried: “Pedicure?”). So far, it has distributed £2bn.
This is broadly the story told in Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, which is nominated for a Bafta – but not, somehow, for an Oscar. “It didn’t knock me down with grief,” says Fox of the snub. “I think there may be something to the fact that it won four Emmys.” He’s no stranger to small-screen (or comedy) snobbery, and anyway, he says: “I already have an Oscar.” They gave him an honorary one “and I can’t say I don’t enjoy it”.
Still was made around the time he received that award, in 2022. It splices archive footage from his work, readings from his (brilliant) memoirs and an intimate sit-down with Guggenheim. Fox is bruised – literally, from all the falls – but unbowed, upbeat and witty.
Over our video call earlier this week, he is in many ways the same. Mind still razor-sharp. Does he see any parallels between himself and Guggenheim’s previous subjects? “No,” he shoots back. “Bill Gates is much taller than I am.” Still sweet. “I like your prints,” he says, leaning in for a little tour of the wall behind me – an unlikely yet enthusiastic fan of 1950s British Rail posters.
But his story has skipped a few chapters since Still was shot. In the film, he has spells of steady focus that are absent today, when his body rocks in constant motion. He doesn’t discuss his ever-present pain, but “racked” keeps coming to mind. The emotions he’s able to display on his face are more muted, which can make conversation tricky, likewise his sometimes-mumbled speech. When he does smile, it is profoundly moving.
Still explores the gap between 2022 Fox, grasping for calm, and the spookily youthful 80s pin-up. Or maybe the overlap. In the clips, he is forever kinetic: careering through doors, zipping on skateboards, gliding over car bonnets. “Michael is always moving, moving, moving, moving,” says Guggenheim, speaking to me last week. “You wonder: is he being graceful like Fred Astaire or is he, like, half-falling? He still wants to race across the room to hand me a Diet Coke but he shouldn’t.”
Some of the most striking material Guggenheim and his editor assembled comes from early seasons of Spin City when Fox – not yet public with his diagnosis – finds his body betraying him. His left hand twists behind his back; the contortion of a man worried that if people knew he had Parkinson’s they would no longer find him funny.
It was weird to watch that, Fox confirms: sitcom patter made medical evidence. How about the other footage? “People do sometimes ask how I feel seeing myself young and athletic and balletic. Does it upset me? No. Do I change the channel? Yes.”
It got him thinking. So he did something he does a lot: wonder what Muhammad Ali would do. He rang Ali’s widow, Lonnie, who reported that her husband loved revisiting footage of his old fights. “He could watch it for hours. And I’m also very happy, too. I’m very proud of the work. I like that it means something. What’s really cool is when people come up and say – they don’t know quite how to word it – ‘Thank you for my childhood.’ I can’t claim responsibility for their childhood, but I understand what they’re saying. There was a connection there.”
The connection between Ali and Fox is obvious: both became famous as fleet-footed entertainers, then accidentally legendary for having Parkinson’s. Both converted that power into philanthropy. “What I find wonderful about Michael,” says Guggenheim, “is that he did not have any ambitions to improve the world. He wanted to become famous and rich. When he did, he bought a sports car and another sports car and another sports car. When he was diagnosed, his first response was to drink and run away. To do all the wrong things.”
What Fox admired most about Ali, he says, was how lightly he wore the love lavished on him – and his unexpected new responsibilities. They were often toasted at the same events. “I loved standing next to him,” says Fox, “because that was the greatest way to be invisible. They wouldn’t see you, only him. But he had no time to talk about what he meant to the world. He did what he did, and, to a much lesser degree, I just did what I did, because it seemed the right thing to do.”
Excess reflection is pointless. “It just is what it is. It didn’t defeat me. I wish it was a heroic thing. I’m not saying: ‘Yeah! Bring it, bring it!’ I hate it. It sucks. It’s a piece of shit. It’s tough to get up in the morning and keep going. But I have a beautiful family and this office with trophies.”
Further veneration holds little appeal. “I’m not interested in hagiography. I certainly wasn’t interested in being held up as any kind of saint or martyr.” Because it’s boring? “It is boring. It’s really boring. Life is something to take on its own terms. If you try to create a jewel case to put it in, and highlight it a certain way, it won’t work. It’s not gonna be of value.”
Fox declined a producer credit on Still, “so I remain a credible witness. Otherwise, everything I say or do is up for question. What’s my motive?” But he did request more candid footage of himself being (very moderately) cocky: “People with disabilities can be assholes, too.” That is also why he liked playing a version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm who may or may not be hamming up his symptoms to annoy Larry David.
Fox has not acted for a decade. Is it tough to be himself all the time? “It’s a struggle. It’s very difficult. I get sick of talking about me. I know me too well.”
He keels towards his drink. “And I never know what I’m presenting to people, because it’s not necessarily what I’m feeling. You say to people: whatever you’ve seen me doing, I’m actually doing something else. But it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to second-guess how I’m feeling. I don’t wanna make other people correct their paths or rearrange their position to deal with whoever I am at the moment.”
Watching people watch him is “a nice thing, but a strange thing. They’re not dealing with me. They’re dealing with who they see me be.”
Before I spoke to Fox, I was planning to ask if he had any qualms about being such a prominent Parkinson’s spokesperson given his exceptionalism: his relative youth and fitness, his fame, money and access to the latest interventions – and his not having developed dementia, as up to 80% of Parkinson’s patients do. It takes two seconds in his company to scrap that question. Parkinson’s is brutal, no matter how cushioned you are.
Yet Fox wants pity (he has called it “a benign form of abuse”) even less than he wants deification. Rather, he maintains that the disease saved rather than derailed him. That it is central to his charmed life, not cosmic payback for it – though Guggenheim’s film lets that thought dangle a little.
Fox’s tight grip on the silver lining is what first caught the director’s attention. The film’s unspoken conundrum, says Guggenheim, is “what happens when an incurable optimist confronts something perfectly designed to defeat that optimism?”
Does Fox have an answer? “The last thing you run out of is a future. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you do, you’ll always have the future. Until you don’t. Then it’s moved, and it really mattered. But I’m in it for the final scene. I’m not leaving early to get to the car before the crowd starts.”
Walking home one night after filming, Guggenheim says he was surprised to find himself envying Fox. “These are dark, dark times. The Middle East, the election in America. Is it possible to choose optimism? Michael seems to do it, and I don’t, and I’m trying to learn how to.”
Fox pauses when I put this to him. “It’s really scary what’s going on right now. My children are young adults. I feel bad about the shit they’re gonna have to deal with when I’m gone. But the only answer is to be optimistic. If you obsess on the worst case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice. I don’t wanna do that. I wanna live on a daily basis.”
And that is how Parkinson’s may have helped. Almost as soon as he told people he had it, he had a mission to get rid of it. “It just became my whole purpose. And then that was the answer. I didn’t have time to think about it. And Parkinson’s has been by far the most exciting thing – much more than my career.”
It may even have been more successful. Run with the aim of spending every cent, every year, the Fox Foundation has bankrolled more research than the US government. “We want to cluster bomb all this stuff. Whatever’s going, we go in and investigate it, do risky funders.”
He is excited about deep brain stimulation and optimistic about biomarkers, which pave the way to identifying the disease before symptoms show. By the time his finger began to twitch, “75% of my dopamine-producing cells were dead. But if we get that early, we can treat that prophylactically and we can eliminate it.”
I ask about spinal cord implants. Set for wider trial later this year, they bypass the brain in an attempt to correct motor function. Might he consider that? “I don’t view any of this stuff as an opportunity to explore paths for myself,” he says. Plus an unrelated tumour on the spine, removed in 2018, rules him out: “I have a little bit of Parkinson’s Plus.”
He smiles and then he goes a bit cryptic. There is something else on the horizon. He is “aware of research” in “an area which I can’t say, specifically” that he is sure will make a real difference: “I bet you dollars to doughnuts!” Over what sort of timeframe? “That’s exactly how I don’t think!” he grins. “But, OK, I’ll go with you. I think within the next 10, 15 years, we’ll have a viable solution in some form or another, whether it’s getting it cured or pathologically avoided.”
I’m stunned into silence. Fox, ever-friendly, does my job for me. “The follow-up question is: will I be around for that? I doubt it. But it’s OK. I don’t think in personal terms – you just want to meet the moment. And I think the moment is nigh. For big, big answers.”
