Christopher Lloyd, the legendary Doc from ‘Back to the Future’, opens up about his addictions in his memoir
The 88-year-old actor reflects on his lonely childhood in Connecticut, his move to New York in the 1960s, his 50-year career and his struggles with alcohol and drugs in ‘In My Own Time: A Memoir’
In a single week, Christopher Lloyd, the mad scientist of the 1980s trilogy Back to the Future, turned 88 and published In My Own Time: A Memoir. The 250-plus-page book traces his lonely childhood in Waveny House, in Connecticut; the start of his acting career in 1960s New York; and his battle with alcohol and cocaine addiction, subjects he has rarely discussed publicly. In the book he says the first time he took drugs was outside a comedy club in Los Angeles in the 1970s. He went up to the car of a woman he had just met and did “a couple of lines.” He writes: “That was all it took,” he writes. He got hooked almost immediately, and that’s where his cocaine abuse began.
The actor, also known for his role in the series Taxi, explains how his use of cocaine, alcohol and marijuana quickly became habitual, although he notes in the book that he never appeared on stage or in front of a camera under the influence of those substances. “I wasn’t asking myself what it meant or what it was doing for me. I just knew I liked it, and before long it had a hold on me.”
Lloyd also recalls a specific episode involving his then partner in the early 1980s. After spending the night at his nephew’s house in Los Angeles, he returned home to find his partner had locked him out, so he began pounding on the windows. “The next thing I remember, I was lying on the floor of my kitchen, bleeding out, and paramedics were attending to me,” he wrote. “I later learned that I had lost so much blood that they had to give me plasma.”
Lloyd then underwent hand surgery and several physical therapy sessions to make sure he would “be able to spread my fingers correctly.” His Taxi co-star Andy Kaufman, who was 35 at the time, had died of cancer the night before at the same hospital where Lloyd was treated.
The star of The Addams Family (1991) entered a rehabilitation center in 1993 after attending psychotherapy that helped him see the damage drugs and alcohol were doing to his life. He stayed in rehab for five weeks. “That was the beginning, but not the end of it,” Lloyd recounted. “I relapsed a few times after that…Some years later on April 1, I got sober for what turned out to be the last time.”
The 1992 Emmy winner also writes about playing the eccentric Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, co-starring Michael J. Fox, revealing that both Interstellar actor John Lithgow and Jurassic Park actor Jeff Goldblum were on the shortlist to play the iconic character. Lloyd’s resume includes other iconic work: he has played the title role in King Lear, and in the second season of the series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega, he returned to the Addams Family universe as the incorporeal head of Professor Orloff.
“Now, for the first time, Christopher shares stories from his life that he has rarely spoken about before,” Grand Central Publishing said of the book. Raised largely by governesses in a childhood he describes as “lonely,” he became a “keen observer” of the people and the relationships around him, including the fraught relationship between his mother — a creative woman with alcohol problems — and his stern father. After moving to New York, Lloyd immersed himself in the demanding theatre life. On stage he developed the intensity that came to define his work. From there his career expanded into television and film, where audiences came to know him as the intense, unpredictable Taber in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), the eccentric and endearing Reverend Jim Ignatowski in five seasons of Taxi (1978–1983), and the wild-eyed Doc Brown in Back to the Future — performances that are among the most memorable in film and television of their era.
“I never thought about writing a book in my lifetime, but I got to a point where I wanted to review my journey,” Lloyd told People magazine on May 6. “It was so satisfying. Soon it will be yours,” he said at the time.
In some promotional posts on his Instagram account, where he has 1.5 million followers, he has been revealing snippets from the book: “Much of my free time was spent with Ricky, our family dog. He was a magnificent German shepherd we’d had since I was five, and one of my closest companions during those years,” he wrote on September 18. “Throwback Thursday to me and a fellow Christopher - Walken, that is - during a celebrated run of Macbeth that Joe Papp put together for Lincoln Center Theater in 1974. Among our castmates were Peter Weller, Carol Kane, John Heard and James Tolkan,” he writes in another post.
“As a kid, I loved Charles Addams’s wonderfully twisted cartoons in The New Yorker. I never could have imagined that years later I’d be asked to step into that world myself as Uncle Fester,” he posted on October 3 alongside a photo of him as the character in the classic movie in which he co-starred with Anjelica Huston and Christina Ricci. “You can’t play King Lear at twenty or thirty with a fake white beard and a cane and a crown. You have to have lived long enough to have really wrestled with the questions he’s grappling with. And I’d still like to play him again,” he writes in his series of promotional fragments. “It took probably three Back to the Future movies before Michael and I truly got to know each other. But it would come, and we’ve been great friends ever since,” he says in another post.
With a nod to the famous trilogy that made him one of cinema’s most recognizable faces, he celebrated nearly nine decades with a message on his X account: “Today I turn 88…I’ve seen some serious shit. The most serious of it all is love. I love my family, my friends, and my wonderful fans. The power of love remains.” The message harks back to one of the most emblematic scenes of the first film in the saga, which marks the first test of the time machine — a device that has prompted Lloyd, with the publication of his memoirs, to revisit his past.
“Christopher Lloyd offers a rare and deeply personal reflection on a life spent both onstage and on screen, told with charm, dry wit, and honesty,” the publisher promises. He joins the long list of performers who have opened up about their lives: Sylvester Stallone, Lea DeLaria, Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Douglas and Christina Applegate are some of the actors who have recently published their memoirs.
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