Legendary actor Michael J. Fox, 64, stopped by The Viewon Monday, Oct. 13, and surprised fans by admitting that his longtime friendship with his Back to the Future costar Lea Thompson, 64, got off to a rocky start way back in 1984.
“You joined the movie [late] because it had already been filming for six weeks with other folks, but you were the original… You were who they wanted,” Whoopi Goldberg said in the interview. “But what was the chemistry like? Because you ended up replacing Eric Stoltz… You then had to go in and work with Lea [Thompson]. So how was that?”
“She is a good friend of mine, a good friend for a long time,” he shared, but the Family Ties actor said she was a bit judgmental when they first met. Years later, the actress who played Lorraine Baines McFly admitted to Fox why she “was prepared not to give [him] a bit of slack.”
“She tells me the story that when I was brought in, she thought, ‘This guy is a TV actor,'” the Marty McFly actor told the ladies of The View. “She admittedly felt a little snobby about a TV actor coming in to replace her friend. She knew Eric really well.”
Fox said Thompson wasn’t immediately charmed by his “schtick.” “Everything full-on, and she wasn’t used to that,” he remembered. But it was his humor that eventually won her over when he suggested a tweak to one of her lines.
“I said, ‘Where are my pants?’ and she said, ‘Over there.’ Then I said, ‘This is a joke here,'” he remembered thinking. “I’m used to sitcoms, used to my jokes. I said, ‘Joke here — over there in my hope chest.'”
Michael J. Fox and Lea Thompson, 2002Getty
The director, Robert Zemeckis, agreed to changing her line, and when she said it, “she got a huge laugh,” said Fox. That changed everything for the duo. “She was all of a sudden really happy, and Bob was really happy, and I said, ‘This is what I do in my sitcom. It’s what I do.’ So it was fun.”
40 years later, the pair is still close friends, often appearing at events like Comic Con together, and always smiling. The pair even reunited with Tom Wilson, who played Biff Tannen in the films, in June 2025 for Thompson’s 64th birthday. The longtime besties were seen beaming together over the lit candles on Thompson’s cake in a fun Instagram post.
This story was originally reported by Parade on Oct 13, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.