November 21, 2025
Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox
I thoroughly enjoyed Michael J. Fox’s new memoir Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space Time Continuum, written with Nelle Fortenberry. Fox as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties was my very first crush around the age of 6—the P was an ad lib, the book tells us—and while I didn’t see Back to the Future right away, I became obsessed with it once I finally caught it on VHS, and it’s remained one of my favourite movies ever since, perhaps the beginning of my fascination with time travel stories and a weird relationship with nostalgia that my therapist and I are still working through.
In Future Boy, Fox tells the story of the movie role that launched him to stardom which he nearly didn’t get—he was a last minute replacement for another actor to play Marty McFly, after six weeks of filming had already been completed (although the part was originally written with him in mind!). And in order to fulfill his contract to Family Ties, which rehearsed all day Monday to Thursday, and filmed in front of a studio audience on Fridays, Fox worked on Back to the Future evenings, overnight and on the weekends, all of which made for a schedule that would have been impossible for anybody who wasn’t in their 20s.
But Fox was in his 20s, and he writes about how filming a movie and TV concurrently didn’t really seem any more impossible than the amazing things that were happening to him around that time, when he’d only recently just stopped being a struggling actor eating out of dumpsters. Apparently the Delorean was a bitch to drive and everybody hated it. He writes about being looked down upon by his film colleagues for being a TV actor, and how he challenged the film’s direction by bringing in ad-libbing and making suggestions as he’d become accustomed to doing on Family Ties. Because of his height or lack thereof, they ended up replacing the actor originally cast as Marty’s girlfriend in the film. And he might never have been able to make the movie at all if it weren’t for Meredith Baxter’s pregnancy (she and Michael Gross played his parents on Family Ties, but were only fifteen years older than he was!) which shifted the scheduling of the show.
In the first paragraph of the book, Fox concedes that he understands precisely nothing of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the space-time continuum, but has fun considering the idea that time was played with during the absolutely bonkers scheduling of his life while making the film, and also that time travel may well be a thing, because how else could a 40-year-old movie seem like it was made just yesterday?
