Christopher Lloyd on His Memoir, Acting Career and Back to the Future

Christopher Lloyd wears Robe Chateau Marmont. Watch Omega.

Christopher Lloyd has spent a career making himself hard to separate from the characters he plays. Doc Brown, Reverend Jim and Judge Doom are vivid, outsized creations; the actor behind them has generally kept his own story to himself. That reserve is part of what makes his memoir, In My Own Time, such a revealing change of pace. At 88, Lloyd still doesn’t seem eager to turn personal history into performance. It takes an old friend, Back to the Future co-star Michael J. Fox, to draw him out.

The conversation ranges from a childhood shaped by isolation to the choices that carried Lloyd from New York theater into television and film. It also returns to the early days of Back to the Future, when a major casting change meant Lloyd would have to find a new rhythm with the actor stepping into Marty McFly’s role. His recollections are measured, often matter-of-fact. Fox supplies the momentum, and a familiar friendship gives the exchange its warmth.

TUESDAY 3 PM SEPTEMBER 1, 2026 SANTA BARBARA

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A memoir prompted by other people

Fox opens with the easy teasing of friends who have known each other for years. He’s appearing against a Hamptons backdrop and jokes about Jon Hamm and Gwyneth Paltrow wandering through it. Lloyd, meanwhile, has chosen a virtual view of space. He and his wife, Lisa Loiacono, had recently been to the Hamptons, Fox says, and he wishes Lloyd had called.

That playful start soon turns to the book. Fox is struck that, despite their long friendship, he doesn’t know much about Lloyd’s life. Lloyd agrees that he rarely talks about himself. He says the decision to write a memoir didn’t come from a sudden urge to tell his story: people had suggested it for years, but he had never felt drawn to the project. He finally agreed after Loiacono strongly encouraged him.

Fox presses him on why he’s so private. Is there nothing to say, he asks, or does Lloyd simply consider his past nobody else’s business? Lloyd rejects both explanations. His difficulty, he says, is more basic: he doesn’t always know what to say. He grew up with few conversations at home. His relationship with his father wasn’t conversational, and his mother’s struggles created another barrier. That early quiet, Lloyd suggests, never quite left him.

Writing about childhood didn’t send him into a particular emotional state. He approached the memories plainly, taking stock of what happened without feeling pulled toward either a painful or sentimental reading. The recollections span the difficult and the joyful. That evenhandedness suits a book written by someone who has spent much of his life letting the work speak first.

Waveny’s wide grounds, and a lonely home life

One of Fox’s surprises is Lloyd’s childhood home: Waveny, a vast property in New Canaan. Lloyd says his grandfather had originally bought about 400 acres. By the time Lloyd lived there, the property covered around 350. His family moved into the house when he was five, and the scale of the place became ordinary to him.

Fox asks him to picture the grounds. Lloyd offers a compact sketch: a pond, a canoe and plenty of snakes. The pond wasn’t especially large, but he could row around it. He also became fascinated by the snakes. Fox recognizes the pattern from his own childhood. Although his family had little money, he recalls building rafts, exploring near a pond and catching snakes. For both men, time outdoors meant making private adventures out of whatever was at hand.

The grandeur of Waveny didn’t translate into an easy social life. There were no close neighbors, Lloyd says, and he had few friends. During his years at public school in New Canaan, he made one attempt to invite classmates over. The front lawn had an oval patch of grass, so he asked five or six children to play touch football. They were overwhelmed by the house and grounds. The game didn’t work, and Lloyd didn’t repeat the experiment.

Fox wonders whether Lloyd’s parents’ difficult relationship made it harder to bring other children home. Lloyd doesn’t think that was the reason. He says he simply didn’t make much effort to form friendships. Around halfway through third grade, his parents sent him to boarding school. Asked if they wanted to be rid of him, he says no. His mother had problems with alcohol, and his father was taciturn; the couple didn’t get along, and their relationship could become ugly. When Fox asks whether it ever turned physical, Lloyd says his father was the one who did so.

Boarding school didn’t register in Lloyd’s memory as a clear rescue or a new hardship. He recalls feeling like a ball pushed from one place to another, accepting the changes as the way life worked. Fox sees a similar quality in his adult friend: a tendency to take what arrives, absorb it and continue. Lloyd isn’t sure that description fits, but he doesn’t dismiss it.

Suit Bottega Veneta. Shirt Christopher’s Own. Sunglasses Jacques Marie Mage.

An artistic path shaped by family, but chosen for himself

Lloyd’s route to acting runs, in part, through his mother. As a young woman, she wanted to sing on Broadway, but her parents refused to let her pursue it. She married before she was 30, and later, in her late thirties, began drinking. Even while alcohol became a serious problem, she pursued the singing career she had once been denied: taking lessons, renting a studio at Carnegie Hall and working with voice instructors. She eventually performed recitals in India, Paris and New York.

Lloyd speaks with admiration for her persistence. The performances came later than she might have hoped, but she still managed to do what she had wanted for years. His father financed the singing work. Fox suggests that Lloyd may have absorbed his mother’s artistic ambition, even if it didn’t feel like a direct influence at the time. Lloyd allows that possibility. He also had an older brother who acted, though he doesn’t remember consciously following his example.

Fox’s read is that Lloyd wanted to act for the craft, not for celebrity. Lloyd says he doesn’t mind being recognized for his work, but fame wasn’t the point. His route to the profession began early. After high school, perhaps at 16, he worked at summer stock theaters, all of them professional Equity houses. He listened as actors talked about New York and acting schools. The teacher they spoke of with particular respect was Sanford Meisner.

Lloyd later studied with Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse for two years. Fox mentions that his wife also attended Meisner’s classes. The training took place before Lloyd had an agent or a clear industry foothold. He read Backstage, a magazine for actors, to track theater opportunities and began taking part in workshops. Fox jokes that Lloyd must have been around Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken before they became famous. Lloyd clarifies that those connections came later.

By then, Lloyd was working in New York and largely outside his parents’ orbit. His father had died; his mother lived for many more years. She supported her son’s career and got to see it take shape through newspaper clippings about Taxi and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Lloyd recalls that she was proud to see the work paying off.

Suit and Shirt Armani.

From New York theater to the screen

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became Lloyd’s first film. The production came to New York to cast the movie, and a casting director he knew arranged an audition for director Miloš Forman and producer Michael Douglas. Lloyd got the part. The 1975 film also featured Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito, though Lloyd says he and DeVito weren’t acquainted before the shoot.

Fox remembers seeing the film at 14, during a family trip to Calgary. It was the first time he’d encountered acting that felt so lived in. Nicholson’s performance was an obvious force, but Fox was especially taken by Lloyd and DeVito, whose work gave the film another kind of depth. Lloyd’s response is characteristically brief: Nicholson was made for the role.

The film’s success didn’t instantly change Lloyd’s career. He continued working in independent films, taking television guest roles and appearing in a Broadway musical and New York theater productions. For more than a decade, he stayed in New York. The idea of committing to a television series carried a stigma in theater circles. Some actors considered it a betrayal of the stage, the place they saw as the heart of the profession.

Lloyd had the financial freedom to take his time. He tells Fox that a trust fund meant he could afford to be selective, and he initially told his agent, Bob Gersh, that he didn’t want to do a series. Fox recognizes Gersh as his own first agent, in 1979. As time went on, though, Gersh began arranging meetings for different shows. Starsky & Hutch was one; Taxi was another.

Before that turn toward television, Lloyd was in a New York play when he spoke with Gersh. Something about television seemed compelling, or perhaps Gersh simply wanted to represent him. Lloyd packed up and drove to Los Angeles. Fox asks whether he had set out to pursue television. Lloyd says he went because he had an agent, not because he had settled on a particular destination.

Finding Reverend Jim

On Taxi, Lloyd created Reverend Jim, a character Fox calls brilliant. Asked whether he built the role from someone he had played before, Lloyd says it was entirely new. Fox wonders whether he drew on a particular person or image. Lloyd had seen plenty of people who appeared intoxicated or disconnected, he says, and the behavior was familiar enough to observe.

The role also sits beside Lloyd’s own history with alcohol, which he discusses in the memoir. Fox asks whether Lloyd was drinking while playing Jim. Sometimes, Lloyd says, though it hadn’t yet become a major problem. Asked if professional success made the problem worse, Lloyd says no. He was happy and hadn’t expected things to turn out well.

Fox, who has also written about his own drinking, understands the difficulty of publishing that kind of personal account. Once the story is in a book, he says, it belongs to readers as well as the person who lived it. For Lloyd, a private man, that disclosure could be especially complicated. He confirms that he had a problem. Fox notes that they are both in recovery, and Lloyd responds simply: good.

There’s no tidy explanation in the exchange for how acting, family history and drinking intersected. Lloyd doesn’t turn the memoir into a lesson. Instead, his recollections place these parts of his life beside one another: an isolated boyhood, a mother pursuing a musical dream amid her struggles, and a career that developed through work across stage, television and film.

The new rhythm of Back to the Future

Fox sees a kinship between their childhoods, despite their different circumstances. Lloyd grew up amid the privilege of a sprawling country property, but also in a quiet home marked by serious family problems. Fox remembers his own childhood in less affluent surroundings and recognizes the shared impulse to find a way into the arts. Their friendship, he says, clicked quickly when they met in a parking lot in Pomona to make Back to the Future.

Fox asks Lloyd what he expected from the film. He recalls Lloyd as the cast member with a particularly demanding job: Doc Brown delivers much of the setup and guides the story. Fox also remembers Lloyd staying steady through a major change in the production. Before Fox joined, Lloyd had already worked for six weeks with Eric Stoltz in the role of Marty McFly.

Lloyd remembers the announcement clearly. The crew had spent several nights filming at a shopping mall, with lunch around one in the morning. After a break, they gathered around a trailer. Steven Spielberg, Lloyd thinks, told them that Fox would take over the role the following morning. Lloyd’s first reaction was practical and a little stunned: he had put almost everything into the six weeks of footage and was still finding his way into the work. Now he would have to do it all again.

Then Fox arrived, and the scene changed. Lloyd describes his new co-star’s spontaneity, humor, quickness and intelligence as a gift. The adjustment worked. Fox, in turn, remembers arriving to a set where some people viewed him as an unlikely replacement, coming from television while Stoltz had a film background. Lloyd never treated him as an outsider. For Fox, the Doc and Marty relationship was the central thing to establish; feeling welcomed by Lloyd helped him find his footing.

Fox’s gratitude is specific. Lloyd, he says, could fully inhabit a character without making his own approach more important than anyone else’s. He allowed other actors to work in their own way, and that openness helped the scenes come alive. The compliment touches the core of Lloyd’s craft as Fox sees it: an actor can disappear into a role and still remain present with the people sharing the frame.

Lloyd accepts the praise with a brief thank-you. Fox tells him he loves him and says he’ll return to Santa Barbara in the spring. Lloyd and Loiacono have since moved from their previous home to a new place in Montecito, and Fox promises to visit. The exchange closes where it began: with the ease of old friends, and a glimpse of the private person behind a collection of unforgettable roles.

Jacket, Sweater, and Pants Celine. Pen and Notebook Montblanc.

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Grooming: Frankie Payne at Opus Beauty.

Fashion Assistant: David Miller.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Dara Danenberg.

Post-production: Blythe Cross.

Location Chateau Marmont.

The post Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox Go Back to the Past appeared first on Interview Magazine.