Great Scott! Seems that Christopher Lloyd was fearful of a major casting change that led to the classic Back To The Future we know and love today.
In case you didn’t know, and as crazy as it sounds, Michael J. Fox was not initially cast as Marty McFly. Instead, Eric Stoltz was the original lead opposite of Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Emmet Brown. The duo shot for six weeks before Zemeckis decided to replace Stoltz with Fox.
Stoltz was known for being a method actor on set going as far as wanting the crew of Back to the Future to refer to him as “Marty” instead of Eric. This serious attention to his craft seemed to have carried over to his portrayal of McFly. According to Lloyd, the studio wanted someone with a “comic flair” – so they brought in Fox, and in a new retrospective, Lloyd described his shock upon learning of the last-minute change.
“I had no idea the change was coming,” Lloyd told GQ.
“One night we were shooting the mall beginning sequence, and we were asked to come to one of the trailers at one o’clock in the morning. [Steven] Spielberg was there and he made the announcement of the change.”
On having to reshoot the first six weeks, Lloyd said, “My biggest fear, because I was really working to get Doc right, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can get it up to do that again’. So I was worried about it. But, it all worked out.”
Stoltz would later star in Mask, Say Anything, Pulp Fiction, and Mad About You. He has yet to comment on this situation publicly.
