Before landing his first signature role in Family Ties as Alex P. Keaton, Michael J. Fox struggled to pay the rent. While promoting his new memoir Future Boy, Fox reminisced with Entertainment Weekly about replacing Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future. “You bring yourself into the situation where all your bets are on the table, and you just play your hand,” Fox said. “I was five years into it, I had a bit of success with Family Ties, but I had two years of just dumpster diving and insulting conditions. I was ready for my break.”
Fox had previously opened up about his impoverished acting days while promoting Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. He’d moved to Los Angeles from his native Canada, where he’d dropped out of high school to pursue his acting dreams. “I was living on the margins,” he confessed to Variety. “I was 18 years old, with no money, no connections, literally dumpster diving for food.” When Fox wasn’t taking a bus to auditions, he was hiding from his landlord, dangerously behind on his rent.
“By the spring of 1982, the scenario was grim,” Fox says in the Still documentary. “I continued to pick up acting jobs, but they barely earned me enough to live on. My agent took 10% of my paycheck. Then there was a photographer, a publicist, or a lawyer.”
To avoid moving back to Canada, Fox sold off his sectional sofa, section by section. He got close on a few movies, notably Ordinary People. “But Robert Redford seemed less than impressed by my reading. He spent the audition flossing his teeth.”
Fox says that the term “running out of money” was too generous to describe his situation. “I had no money. I was taking jam packets from IHOPs. I’d find quarters and nickels and dimes, and I’d use that to get to the next moment. I was moving beat to beat.”
Finally, Fox was faced with a return home. “I said, I gotta get out of here. I have no money, and I owe the IRS money, and I’m ducking the landlord, and I got no phone. I mean, I have to walk to the airport.” He figured he’d get a job with his brother’s construction company, picking up nails on job sites.
But like in a movie, fortune turned just in time. Right before his return, he nailed a last-ditch audition for Family Ties. Two years later, he was being driven back and forth by limo between the sitcom set and Back to the Future, an exhausting but exhilarating experience.
“After years of struggling as an actor, success seemed to have dropped into my lap all at once,” Fox writes in Future Boy. “What a whirlwind.”
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