Shrinking Boss Bill Lawrence Tees Up Reunion With His 'Hero' Michael J. Fox, Shares Favorite Spin City Memory
You know the old saying, "Don't work with your heroes"? Well, perhaps it actually should have been "Don't work with your heroes... unless your hero is Michael J. Fox."
On Saturday, I moderated the Bill Lawrence & Friends panel at ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas — a panel that also featured Zach Braff (Scrubs), Josh Hopkins (Cougar Town), Brett Goldstein and Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso), and Charly Clive (Lawrence's forthcoming HBO show) — and I asked Lawrence about his reunion with the Spin City star, who has already filmed scenes for Season 3 of Apple TV+'s Shrinking (premiere date TBA).
"He's one of the greatest people I've ever met, he's one of my mentors — and man, what an inspiring dude the way that he is living his life, so to get to work with him...." Lawrence pauses, then continues: "I didn't expect to have career highlights at this point in my career, and I was on set about 10 days ago watching Harrison Ford, Mike Fox and Candice Bergen — oops, spoiler! — acting together. For me, that was my childhood."
Additional details surrounding Fox's guest stint — which marks his first acting gig in five years — are being kept under wraps, along with any information about who Bergen is playing. But the fact that Fox is sharing scenes with Ford — whose character, Dr. Paul Rhoades, also lives with Parkinson's disease — is certainly telling.
As a follow-up, I ask Lawrence if he has a favorite memory of Fox from their time working together on the aforementioned Spin City. What followed was an anecdote from the very beginning of the ABC sitcom's 1996-2002 run:
I remember when Mike first made me feel comfortable. I was lucky enough to have a mentor [Family Ties mastermind Gary David Goldberg] with whom I co-created Spin City. I was 25 years old, and Mike Fox was saying things I wrote, and I was so scared to give him notes.
What finally broke the ice — and I think he did this on purpose — was there was a joke that I was convinced was going to be f–king funny. Mike's like, 'Dude, not funny,' and I'm like, 'It's gonna be funny,' and he's like, 'All right, I'll do it.' It's the first scene with a huge audience, it's crackling with electricity, and we get to that joke, and he says it, and there's f–king crickets. And instead of going on with the scene, he just looked over at me and goes, 'You f–king happy now?' [Laughs] He was letting me know that it was OK [to give him a note], and it gave me so much confidence. But he was also letting me know that those of us who write don't have to have that kind of egg on our face if it goes south, so one of the things we always tell everybody [on my shows] is if you do something silly and big and bold and go for it, and it doesn't work, I promise it won't be on the show. But yeah, I hope you guys like seeing Mike on TV again. He's my hero.