Marty McFly travels backward and forward in time throughout the Back to the Future trilogy, but Michael J. Fox was never quite the right age for the role he played in the series. Fox, like many actors famous for playing teenagers, was out of his teens before he played an iconic adolescent. It is not unusual for teenage characters to be portrayed by actors in their early twenties in Hollywood, both because this means that studios don’t need to deal with child labor laws and because some teen movies feature content that would be inappropriate for actors who were the same age as their characters.
This did, however, mean that Fox was almost 30 by the time the surprisingly successful sequel Back to the Future Part II was released in 1989. Since the creators of Back to the Future hadn’t anticipated what a huge hit the original movie would prove, it took a few years for them to get a script together for the sequel. To make up for this lost time, Back to the Future Part II and its sequel Back to the Future Part III were filmed back to back. This smoothed out the production process and became an increasingly commonplace practice for blockbuster franchises in the decades that followed.
Michael J. Fox Was 23 Years Old In Back To The Future
When Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in the original Back to the Future, the actor was 23 years old. Although he was well into his early twenties during filming, Fox was most famous at the time for his role as the teenage hero of Family Ties. Part of what made Marty and Doc’s Back to the Future friendship feel less unlikely was the fact that Christopher Lloyd was actually only 23 years old than Fox, meaning their intergenerational friendship didn’t have quite as large an age gap as there is between the 17-year-old Marty and the 65-year-old Doc.
Michael J. Fox Was 28 Years Old In Back To The Future Part II
By the time Back to the Future Part II arrived, Fox had graduated from television fame to become a major movie star. This didn’t stop the actor from reprising the role of Marty McFly but, by the time he did get to return to the role, the sequel’s delayed production meant that Fox was 28 years old while filming Back to the Future Part II. Marty is still 17 in this sequel, although Fox also played an older version of the character in the future-set sequences. To avoid Fox aging out of the role, Back to the Future Part III was shot concurrently with this sequel.
Michael J. Fox Was (Still) 28 Years Old In Back To The Future Part III
Fox was still 28 years old during the filming of Back to the Future Part III. This bizarre western/sci-fi mashup took the adventure comedy series in a new direction, although many critics now view the divisive sequel as an underrated classic. Thanks to his youthful looks, Fox just about got away with playing Marty’s 17-year-old self in Back to the Future Part III, although it didn’t hurt that the character spent most of the movie disguised as a cowboy. However, there is no doubt that a fourth Back to the Future movie would have needed to age up Fox’s character.