Being around royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! Michael J. Fox recalled his not-so-great experience being seated by Princess Diana at a movie premiere.
Fox, 59, joked about being in close quarters with the late Princess of Wales at the 1985 Back to the Future premiere in London during a Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon appearance on Wednesday, November 18.
“She was sitting next to me. The lights go down and the movie starts, and I realize I am one fake yawn and an arm stretch away from being on a date with her, which is hilarious,” he said.
Though the night got off to a great start, everything took a turn for the worse when he realized he needed to use the bathroom. “The movie started and also, I had to go pee,” he explained. “So, for the rest of the movie, I’m sitting there, like, dying. I can’t say anything to her and I can’t walk away from her, because I can’t turn my back on her.”
The Teen Wolf star added, “So, it was just agony. It could have been the greatest night of my life, but it was just a nightmare. A pee-holding nightmare.”
Jimmy Fallon then asked Fox whether Diana, who died in 1997 after a tragic car crash in Paris, liked the film. “She seemed to laugh a couple times,” Fox replied.
Fox starred in Back to the Future as Marty McFly, a California teenager who is sent to the 1950s by his scientist pal, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). While there, Marty runs into his parents’ younger selves and he must make sure that they fall in love. Failing to do so would result in him ceasing to exist.
The sci-fi flick was a huge hit at the time, drumming up more than $381 million worldwide. A second and third installment arrived in 1989 and 1990, respectively.
The possibility of a fourth film has long been speculated, but the trilogy’s cowriter Bob Gale recently shut down the chances of that happening — even a version without Fox. “People say, ‘Well, do it with somebody else.’ Really? Who are you going to get?” the screenwriter, 69, told Collider last month. “All you’re gonna do is beg comparisons to the originals, and you’re not going to match up.”
Fox revealed in his new memoir, No Time Like the Future, that he will retire from acting again for health reasons. The American President actor was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease in 1991 at just 29 years old.
“There is a time for everything, and my time of putting in a twelve-hour workday, and memorizing seven pages of dialogue, is best behind me. At least for now,” he wrote in the book, which was released on Tuesday, November 17. “In fairness to myself and to producers, directors, editors, and poor beleaguered script supervisors, not to mention actors who enjoy a little pace, I enter a second retirement.”
Fox added, “That could change, because everything changes. But if this is the end of my acting career, so be it.”
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