The icon announced his retirement in 2020 but tells ET he's open to the right role.
Michael J. Fox announced his retirement from acting in 2020, but a walk down memory lane with ET cracked the door open to the possibility of acting again.
ET's Rachel Smith sat down with the icon in Nashville, Tennessee ahead of his charity event benefiting the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the 62-year-old actor was amused watching a 1984 interview with ET when he was 22 years old and starring on the legendary NBC sitcom, Family Ties.
In the clip, Fox opened up about his fascination with the different facets Hollywood has to offer, from editing and writing to producing and directing. At the time, Fox said he wanted to "do it all," prompting him now to quip, "22-year-olds are obnoxious."
When asked if he'd had achieved his goals, Fox noted that goals for him always shifted, but ultimately his goals had very little to do with what happened in front of or behind the screen.
"My biggest goal, I think, was to raise a family. We have four amazing kids and that's been the big thing," Fox said in reference to his wife, Tracy Pollan, whom he met on the set of Family Ties in 1985. "And then the other is with the foundation."
But as far as goals in front and behind the camera?
"If someone offers me a part and I do it and I have a good time, great," Fox told ET. "I mean, the documentary was a big thrill."
The documentary being his new project, Still, an AppleTV+ documentary that chronicles his fight with Parkinson's disease. He was diagnosed with the progressive disorder in 1991 when he was only 29 years old.
"It was fun," Fox said of filming the doc. "I never would have set that as a goal. It just happened."
But when asked straight-up if he would want to act again, Fox didn't shut down the possibility.
"I would do acting if something came up that I could put my realities into it, my challenges, if I could figure it out," Fox said.
Fox retired from acting in 2020. He told Empire Magazine in September 2023 that watching Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood tipped him over the edge to call it a career. The scene that led him to retire featured Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton character having a meltdown in his trailer when he couldn't remember his lines. Fox recalled struggling to memorize his lines when he had a cameo in his final TV project in 2020, when he appeared in two episodes of The Good Wife's spinoff, The Good Fight.
Over the course of his storied career, Fox appeared in a number of iconic TV shows and films, including The Love Boat, Night Court, Spin City, Teen Wolf and, of course, the Back to the Future franchise in which he starred as Marty McFly opposite Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson. And while Fox continued acting amid his Parkinson's diagnosis -- which he publicly disclosed for the first time in 1998 -- there were signs that things were getting incredibly challenging for him, and that was no more evident than when he appeared on The Good Fight.
"I thought of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," Fox told the magazine about his decision to retire. "There's a scene where Leonardo DiCaprio's character can't remember his lines anymore. He goes back to his dressing room and he's screaming at himself in the mirror. Just freaking insane. I had this moment where I was looking in the mirror and thought, 'I cannot remember it anymore.'"
After coming to that determination, Fox told Empire that he decided it was time to "move on," and that his decision "was peaceful."
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