Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox
Michael Andrew Fox, OC, known as Michael J. Fox, is a Canadian-American actor, author, producer, and activist. With a film and television career spanning from the 1970s, Fox's roles have included Marty McFly from the Back to the Future trilogy; Alex P. Keaton from NBC's Family Ties, for which he won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award; and Mike Flaherty in ABC's Spin City, for which he won an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and two Screen Actors Guild...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth9 June 1961
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
I think we all get our own bag of hammers. We all get our own Parkinson's. We all have our own thing. I think that we'll look at it through the filter of that experience, and we'll say, "Yeah, I need to laugh at my stuff, too."
I have now is whenever my kids say, "Can you look at this?" or "Can I ask you something?" or "Can you come here for a minute?" no matter what I am doing, I say yes instead of saying, "Just a sec." They never abuse the privilege, and I never once regretted it. What they took me away to do was never less important than what I was doing already.
There are things I've always wanted to do. Things I may not be able to do, but I never really ruled them out - like running a marathon. It's all a matter of timing for me. I suppose I could probably do it if I planned it out right with medication. I don't set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.
When I was younger, I was always described as happy-go-lucky. Then I drank and I partied - did all that stuff that might tell you maybe there was a little bit of untruth in that [description]. Now, the surprising thing is that when I say stuff, I actually mean it. I don't have to do the work of trying to formulate my point of view. It just is. And it's surprising how much I love life. I just really have a good time.
Lance Armstrong showed up, and I started talking to him; I saw all these people with cancer who followed him to Paris for the Tour de France, and I saw the difference he was making in their lives. That put it together for me...having it be not so much about me, but [my being] a vehicle for it.
I don't feel a yearning or a sense of missed opportunities. I don't have many regrets. So that's a nice feeling. To have no regrets and still have enough sense of adventure to take on risk.
My age makes me think how valuable life is. How bad is something like Parkinson's in relation to not having life at all?
I don't set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.
They did something once that slurred my speech, and I thought, "Oh, man, you're messing with my brain. It's freaking me out."
[Constant curiousity leads to happiness:] I wake up curious every day and every day I'm surprised by something. And if I can just recognize that surprise every day and say, 'Oh, that's a new thing, that's a new gift that I got today that I didn't even know about yesterday,' it keeps me going. It keeps me more than going. It keeps me enthusiastic and grateful!
When something enters your life that is so big and so non-negotiable as catastrophic illness, you either go in denial for a while or ultimately you accept it and you make space for it. And in making space for it, you illuminate a lot of things that you normally don't have room for you simply just look at the world differently.
The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.
If you want to be an agent of change, it starts with you and what you're made of.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?