Christopher Lloyd wears Robe Chateau Marmont. Watch Omega.
Christopher Lloyd has played some of the most iconic characters ever put onscreen, but what do we really know about him? An actor from a generation before oversharing became the norm, the man who gave us Doc Brown, Reverend Jim, and Judge Doom never liked talking about himself too much, making it easier for him to disappear into his roles. He built a career on talent, not self-promotion, moving between Broadway, TV, and film without chasing the spotlight the way his fame might suggest. That same restraint extended to his personal life, which he’s finally putting on display in his new memoir, In My Own Time , but the now 88-year-old actor still seems constitutionally unable to, or at least uninterested in, opening up. opening up. It took his old friend and Back to the Future costar Michael J. Fox to finally get him talking.
TUESDAY 3 PM SEPTEMBER 1, 2026 SANTA BARBARA
MICHAEL J. FOX: Mr. Lloyd. Why are you in space? I’m seeing the Milky Way.
LLOYD: Oh, I don’t know. They showed me the various [Zoom] background choices, and there you go. I’m in space.
FOX: I went for the Hamptons, so Jon Hamm could be walking by in the background. Jon and Gwyneth [Paltrow].
LLOYD: Lisa [Loiacono, Lloyd’s wife] and I were there a couple of weeks ago.
FOX: Let’s talk about your book. Why did you think now is a good time to write your autobiography?
LLOYD: Why not? For a long time, people have said, “You should write a book.” I’ve had no inclination to do it, but the suggestion persisted. I finally relented when Lisa joined in, very strongly saying it’s a good idea, and here we are.
FOX: I’m grateful to them all, because I don’t even know your story and I’ve known you for 100 years.
FOX: You don’t talk about yourself too much.
FOX: Do you think that’s because you don’t have anything to say, or you don’t think we’re worthy of hearing it? Or is it just none of anyone’s business?
LLOYD: It’s not quite any of those. I don’t know what to say. I grew up isolated, in the sense that there was never anybody to talk to. I didn’t have conversations with my dad because that just didn’t exist, and my mother had certain prob lems that created an impediment, so I was never naturally conversational. That exists to this day.
FOX: Oh, I’ll get you talking. Did you enjoy looking back at your childhood when you wrote the book? Was there any part of the process you especially enjoyed? Did you find it painful, or in some way satisfying?
LLOYD: I looked back at it matter- of-factly. This is the way this was or that was. Looking back didn’t wrench me in one direction or another. I have a lot of memories, scaling from not so good to great.
FOX: I loved hearing about Waveny [House], because I had no idea. What was it like living there? It was such rarefied air.
LLOYD: It was kind of quiet, and I took it for granted because we moved into that house when I was five years old.
FOX: Can you describe the house, the grounds, the whole thing, so people can get a picture of it?
LLOYD: I think I gave enough for them to get a good sketch.
FOX: Lay it out for me one more time. How vast were the grounds, the property, and how big was the house?
LLOYD: The acreage, at one point when my grandfather first bought the property, was about 400 acres.
LLOYD: When I lived there it was about 350.
FOX: Did you wander the grounds a lot? Were there secret places? You’re an actor, so I’m sure you had an active imagination. When I was a kid, I lived on army bases and I’d always get lost in the woods. I’d go for hours, out by myself having adventures. It sounds like that kind of place.
LLOYD: There was a pond on the property. It wasn’t huge, but there was a canoe down there, and I could get in the canoe and row around the pond. There were also a lot of snakes. I got very into snakes.
FOX: I grew up in a poor family, but I had very similar adventures. I went down to the pond, built rafts, and caught snakes. I loved it. It was like Stand by Me. That’s really interesting because peo ple would expect you had a very sophisticated, fancy childhood, but it sounds normal. Did you have a lot of friends?
LLOYD: No. There were no close neighbors. I went to the public school in New Canaan for first, second, and half of third grade, and I only once tried doing some thing with friends. The front of the house had an oval patch of lawn, so I invited five or six peo ple to play touch football, but they were awed by the place. It wasn’t good. That experiment was not repeated.
Suit Bottega Veneta. Shirt Christopher’s Own. Sunglasses Jacques Marie Mage.
FOX: You were isolated and the one time you tried having friends over it was awkward and strange. Did that have something to do with your parents? Your parents had an awkward and sometimes volatile relationship. Did not wanting to expose them to that keep you from bringing other kids into your life?
LLOYD: I don’t think so, because I didn’t make any effort to have friends. And halfway through my third year there, my parents decided to send me to boarding school.
FOX: Was that your parents want ing to get rid of you? It didn’t seem like they were that into being parents.
LLOYD: No. My mother had prob lems. Number one, she liked alco hol too much. And my father had a very different disposition. He was a taciturn guy. They didn’t get along well, and it got pretty nasty.
FOX: Did you like the time away? Were you happier to be away at boarding school than you were at Waveny?
LLOYD: I don’t know. I felt like I was a ball, being pushed here and there. I just assumed this is what life is, but I didn’t have an attitude about how horrible or how good it was. I was just, “This is the way it is.”
FOX: To this day, I would describe your nature that way. You take what comes, fold it into your inner life, and move forward.
LLOYD: I’m not so sure of that, but maybe.
FOX: When did you start to get into the arts and when did you choose to live an artist’s life?
LLOYD: My mother, when she was a young woman, really wanted to be a singer. She wanted to be on Broadway and her parents said, “No fucking way.” It was out of the question. So she got married to a guy before my father, and then I guess in her late thirties she started to drink, and that con sumed the rest of her life. While she was doing her drinking, she got voice instructors, rented a studio in Carnegie Hall, and took singing lessons like crazy, in spite of her problem. Eventually she went to India and did some recitals, and I think she did some thing in Paris and even New York. She wanted so bad to do what she finally did, even though it was a little late, but I have a lot of admi ration for it.
FOX: Absolutely. Did your father finance all this? It sounds like an expensive vocation.
FOX: Your mother had this dream. She was rich, but she wasn’t famous. It’s good to be rich and it’s good to be rich and famous, but it’s not good to just be famous. You can’t buy fame.
LLOYD: I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
FOX: I would say, knowing you as well as I do, you wanted to be in the arts, you wanted to be an actor. Your motivation was never to be famous. Your motivation was to do your art.
LLOYD: I don’t mind being recog nized for whatever I do. I don’t object to that. Also, my mother may have influenced me in ways I didn’t even detect at the time. I had an older brother who was an actor, but I never felt that had a direct effect on my decision to be one.
FOX: When did you go to New York to be an actor?
LLOYD: New York was familiar because it’s only an hour away from Waveny and I went there a lot with my family. The first time I went to a dentist, they carried me up to New York. Anyway, after high school, I started working at a summer stock theater.
LLOYD: Sixteen, maybe. And they were all Equity professional the aters. I used to listen to a bunch of actors hanging out and talking about the theater and New York acting schools. The guy they always talked about with partic ular reverence was a teacher by the name of Sandy Meisner.
FOX: My wife went to Sandy Meisner’s classes.
FOX: Just so I know who we’re talking about here, you were hanging out with Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken before they were famous.
LLOYD: That happened later. I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sandy Meisner for two years. I didn’t have an agent or anything. I got Backstage, which was a mag azine for actors, and you could see what’s going on in the theater. I started doing workshops.
FOX: At this point, were you com pletely out of the sphere of your parents?
LLOYD: Yeah. My father had passed away by then, but my mother was still around for a good many years.
FOX: What did she think of you becoming an actor?
LLOYD: She loved it. She lived long enough to see some clippings in the New York Times about Taxi and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In a proud motherly way, she was very happy to see it was working out.
FOX: When did One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest happen?
FOX: Did you do the play before the movie?
LLOYD: No. They came to New York to cast Cuckoo’s Nest. A casting director I knew set me up to audition.
FOX: You auditioned with Miloš [Forman] or Michael [Douglas]?
LLOYD: It was for Michael and Miloš. It worked out, and I did my first film.
FOX: Those actors you worked with were amazing. [Jack] Nicholson, obviously, but also Danny DeVito. Did Danny have something to do with you getting the part in the movie?
LLOYD: I don’t think so. We weren’t acquainted yet.
FOX: Because I remember seeing that movie when I was like 14, in Canada. We were on a trip with my parents to Calgary, and I went to see it in a little theater there, and it just blew me away.
FOX: It was the first acting I’d ever seen that was that deep. You didn’t seem to be performing, you just seemed to be living the experience, and it was so powerful to me.
FOX: I remember especially loving you and Danny, because they were the big flashy parts like Chief [Bromden] and Nicholson’s part, but you guys were so rich and so deep.
LLOYD: Yeah. Nicholson was made for that.
FOX: Did you feel a part of that tre mendous success? Did that change how you thought about acting? Because my impression of you is that you were never trying to get success necessarily, you just wanted to be an actor.
FOX: And then you were in this tre mendous success.
LLOYD: It was probably helpful, but things didn’t just take off. I kept doing independent films and a little guesting on TV. I did a Broadway musical and some theater in New York.
FOX: How did you find your way to television?
LLOYD: I was in New York, in a play, and I talked to my agent, Bob Gersh. There was something very compelling about TV. Maybe it was just that he wanted to sign me, but I packed up, got in the car, and zoomed to Los Angeles.
FOX: With the idea of getting into television?
LLOYD: No, just because I had an agent. I hadn’t had an agent yet.
FOX: Coincidentally, Bob Gersh was my first agent too.
FOX: Yeah, 1979. I want to get a sense of how these things played out. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out in ’75, right? When did you start Taxi?
LLOYD: I’d been in New York for over 10 years, doing all the things, and there was a general attitude that if you did a series, you’re sell ing your soul.
LLOYD: How can you respect your self? Because it was theater, the heart, everything.
FOX: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you didn’t have to worry about money.
LLOYD: Looking back, that had a lot to do with the way I went along, because I could afford it.
FOX: That’s great. A lot of people say they do television because of the money, but you decide it’s another thing to do.
LLOYD: I went out there and told Gersh I didn’t want to do a series. I wasn’t going to sell my soul. As time went on, he started sending me out for meetings for different TV series. Starsky & Hutch was one. And then Taxi came up.
FOX: You developed that charac ter, Reverend Jim. Did you have a version of that character you’d used before, or it was a whole new invention for Taxi?
FOX: It’s a brilliant character. Who did you reference for him? You must have had some kind of person or image in mind.
LLOYD: I’d seen plenty of people who were wasted and out of it for one reason or another. It was a fairly common sight.
FOX: You accounted in the book that you had alcohol problems.
FOX: When you did Jim, were you drinking?
LLOYD: Sometimes. It hadn’t gotten to be a big problem yet.
FOX: Did it become a problem with success?
LLOYD: Oh, no. I was very happy. I didn’t expect things to turn out well.
FOX: Did you have a hard time shar ing that in the book? Because I wrote about my drinking, and I found it very hard. Because once you let it go, it’s out there, and you’re such a private person.
FOX: Well, you recovered. We’re both in recovery.
FOX: A couple more things I want to ask you before we wrap up. Hearing your story, and the dichotomy of your childhood— on one hand, it was living in the country and swimming the pond and all that luxury. But on the other hand, it was this cold, empty household with big prob lems. And then you found acting. It reminds me of my own story, and it’s funny, because we’re so different, but we have similar sto ries. And then, Back to the Future. We both find ourselves in a park ing lot in Pomona. We’d never met before, and right away we just hit it off. I think we’re either kindred spirits or we’re both too foolish to do it any other way than to throw ourselves completely in.
FOX: What did you think was going to happen with Back to the Future? Because people always ask me about my part, but I always thought you were the guy with the hardest row to hoe. You lay out the exposition and continue as our guide throughout the movie. I thought the real-life experience of making the movie might have some impact on you when it got so crazy, but you just doubled down and were amazing.
LLOYD: I remember the night before the morning of your first day. We’d been working all night for a few days in the shopping mall, so lunch would be at like one o’clock in the morning. We broke for lunch, and we were in the park ing lot of the mall, and somebody stood up to say somebody was going to make an announcement after lunch. We had our lunch and then we all gathered around one of the trailers. Spielberg, I think, got up and told us that tomorrow morning, Michael J. Fox is going to be taking over the role of Marty from… What’s his name?
LLOYD: Eric Stoltz. That was pretty stunning news. Because for me, totally selfishly, I felt I’d given 99 percent every moment they shot for six weeks. I had to put a lot of energy into it, and I was still getting into the groove. My first thought was, “Oh my god, I’m going to have to do all that again. How am I going to do it?” But it all worked out. When you came along, it was a whole different game. Your spontaneity, humor, smartness, and intelligence—it was great.
FOX: Earlier you were talking about people thinking film and theater were the only valid things, and if you did television you weren’t a real actor—when I first hit the Back to the Future set, people said, “Who is this guy? Eric Stoltz was a real movie star, and now we got this schmuck from TV.” You never gave me that attitude because you had a television background too. I thought, of all the people here, the only person I really need to lock in with is Doc. If the Doc-Marty rela tionship is happening, I’m safe and good to go. And you were so open to me under hard circumstances. You had to redo your work and find a whole new way to approach the character, but you were so wel coming to me. I don’t know if you ever give yourself credit for what an amazing actor you are. You manage to completely immerse yourself in a role, but never to the detriment of the relationship with the other actors. You don’t think your process is more important than anyone else’s process. You do your process, you let us do ours, and then magic happens.
FOX: You’re welcome. I love you and I’ll see you. I’m coming back to Santa Barbara in the springtime.
FOX: Did you move into your new house yet or what?
LLOYD: Yeah. We moved from where we were when you were here last time, and now we’re in a new house in Montecito.
FOX: Sounds like a good gig. I’ll be there soon.
Jacket, Sweater, and Pants Celine. Pen and Notebook Montblanc.
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