Christopher Lloyd is taking us on a trip to the past again, this time on the page instead of behind the wheel of a DeLorean.
Lloyd, the 88-year-old actor who played eccentric scientist Doc Brown in “Back to the Future” and oddball wedding officiant Reverend Jim on TV’s “Taxi,” chronicles his life and career in the new memoir “In My Own Time” (out now from Grand Central Publishing).
He digs into growing up a shy introvert in a wealthy New England family as well as being a high school dropout finding his creative way in the 1960s and ‘70s theater scene alongside future stars like Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep. Lloyd writes of his many adventures, including visiting a former Nazi commandant’s house on a Greek island, but also his fan-favorite
characters from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “The Addams Family.”
“It could be a big role or a small role, or a role that exceeds its size because it’s so bizarre,” Lloyd writes. “But I'm always thinking about it the same way: I’ve been put in a situation where people are going to be looking at me, so I’ve got to hit every button.”
Here are the actor’s biggest revelations from “In My Own Time”:
Christopher Lloyd was inspired to act by his mom – and ‘Hamlet’
The youngest of seven children, Lloyd spent a lot of his time as a kid living in Waveny House, a historic Connecticut mansion. He writes about having a sometimes difficult relationship with his stern father Samuel but got his artistic streak from his mother Ruth, a singer who would put on concerts for herself to perform. “I’ve been late in admiring the fact that she took the bull by the horns and said, ‘I’m going to do this',” he writes.
Lloyd also tells of how his mom took him to see Laurence Olivier’s film version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” when Lloyd was 10 years old. “That many deaths and bodies all at once is bound to make an impression,” he writes. The “To be, or not to be” speech “emotionally” impacted him: “I had no thoughts of playing the part myself, but the way that Olivier did it got me going.”
Jack Nicholson helped Lloyd on ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
Despite his stage successes, Lloyd had a hard time breaking into film until a New York casting director got him an audition for Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” his first movie role. He had shaved his head for a Lincoln Center production of “Macbeth,” “so I already looked kind of crazy” and was one of several “relatively inexperienced and hungry” actors hired for the now-classic drama.
While filming in 1975 at the Oregon State Hospital, Lloyd connected with costars Danny DeVito, whom he’d also work with on “Taxi,” and the “edgy” Jack Nicholson. Lloyd was having trouble filming a scene and Nicholson picked up on Lloyd’s “faking it,” giving him three important words of advice: “Play the game.” “That awareness of what his other actors were doing at the same time as him helped me snap back into place.”
Christopher Lloyd struggled for years with drugs, alcohol
In one of Lloyd’s most candid confessions in the memoir, he writes about becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol while in LA filming “Taxi” in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. “Cocaine, alcohol and pot had become woven into my life in a serious way,” he writes. During a night out at a comedy club, a woman offered him “a snort,” and though he never tried coke before, a couple of lines “was all it took.”
Lloyd recalls a time after “Taxi” was cancelled when, after a fight with a girlfriend, and was “bleeding out” after punching glass windows while drunk and high. (Lloyd ended up being admitted to Cedars-Sinai a day after “Taxi” costar Andy Kaufman died there.) Lloyd also writes about screenwriter Bob Gale pulling him aside for being drunk while filming “Back to the Future III.” Some years later after working with a psychologist, going to rehab and attending 12-step meetings, Lloyd "got sober for what turned out to be the last time.”
Lloyd tossed his ‘Back to the Future’ script in the garbage
Getting to a point where he felt his movie career was “sinking,” Lloyd was contemplating a move back to New York and a return to the stage in the ‘80s when his agent sent him the script to “Back to the Future.” “I kind of skimmed through it and tossed it into a wastepaper basket,” he reveals, adding a friend told him that was an “extraordinarily arrogant” thing to do. Fortunately for pop culture, he fished it out.
Lloyd won the role of Doc Brown over other actors in the mix for the iconic part, including John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Gene Hackman and Donald Sutherland. He writes about being a little fearful of heights for the legendary clock tower sequence and how he had to reshoot scenes after six weeks of filming when Eric Stoltz was replaced by Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly.
While Stoltz’s departure was “kind of sad,” Lloyd writes that he had “tremendous respect and admiration” for Fox doing the movie and “Family Ties” concurrently. “I was totally taken by surprise,” Lloyd says of Fox. “He brought his own energy and that sparked me to get over my own anxieties.”
The actor once shared an amusing moment with Princess Diana
Lloyd writes a bunch about the “Back to the Future” trilogy and its fandom, and he tells of one sweet story where he went to the 1989 sequel’s premiere in London. Because Fox was unable to attend, Lloyd “got bumped up” and was seated next to the “approachable and attractive” Princess Diana.
Lloyd remembers her laughing every so often but Diana loved one moment in particular, when the villainous Buff runs into the back of a manure truck in his convertible and gets covered in the stuff. “She thought that was hysterical,” Lloyd writes. “I supposed that kind of humor is pretty universal. I just didn’t expect it from royalty.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christopher Lloyd, 88, reveals drug addiction as he looks back on iconic roles
