Michael J. Fox Talks Parkinson’s Disease Progression: ‘I’m Not Gonna Be 80’

Family Ties and Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox has been living with a Parkinson’s diagnosis since 1991, but the disease is getting more challenging by the day, and he doesn’t think he’ll live to see 80.

“Yeah, it’s banging on the door,” Fox told CBS Sunday Morning’s Jane Pauley in an interview scheduled to air on Sunday, April 30. “Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna lie. It’s getting hard, it’s getting harder. It’s getting tougher. Every day it’s tougher. But that’s the way it is. I mean, you know, who do I see about that?”

The 61-year-old told Pauley he had spinal surgery to remove a tumor that, while benign, “messed up” his ability to walk. And he said he had broken multiple bones in falls.

“A big killer with Parkinson’s [is] falling … and aspirating food and getting pneumonia,” he said. “All these subtle ways that gets you. … You don’t die from Parkinson’s. You die with Parkinson’s. So I’ve been thinking about the mortality of it. … I’m not gonna be 80. I’m not gonna be 80.”

Fox, who reunited with Back to the Future costar Christopher Lloyd at New York Comic Con last October, announced in his 2020 memoir, No Time Like the Future, that he had retired from acting because of his Parkinson’s symptoms.

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But the five-time Emmy winner — whose story is told in the Apple TV+ documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, streaming on May 12 — told Entertainment Weekly recently that he can stay optimistic as long as he can stay grateful.

“And I can be grateful if I really think about it because I wouldn’t have had the rest of my life if it weren’t for so many things that [wife] Tracy [Pollan], chief among them, came in and intervened in,” he added. “And it sounds hokey, but to this day, if I can find one little thing to be grateful for, I can be optimistic about it.”

Pauley’s interview with Fox will air on CBS Sunday Morning at 9a/8c on CBS.