“Back to the Future” star Michael J. Fox is back in front of a camera beside “Star Wars” actor Harrison Ford, and this time the assignment isn’t a movie — it’s a short course in friendship. The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research released a video titled “So…Your Friend Has Parkinson’s” on September 2, 2026, pairing two of the biggest stars of the 1980s for a plainspoken conversation about how to support someone living with the progressive brain disorder, which has no cure.
The premise is simple: Fox, 65, sits down next to Ford, 84, and walks him through four rules for being a good friend to someone with a Parkinson’s diagnosis. The tone is loose and comic from the start. Fox jokes that Ford should write his advice down; Ford answers that he’s keeping a mental note; Fox counters that his own handwriting is terrible. When Fox tells Ford he does not need any fancy speeches, Ford says he hates big speeches anyway — a line Fox greets with a deadpan “That’s clear.”
Four Rules for Showing Up
Fox’s first rule is “don’t make it weird.” His second is to keep the response simple — something as ordinary as thanking the person for telling you. The third is to help rather than to fix, a distinction he draws sharply. Ford notes that most people’s instinct is to jump in and solve the problem, and Fox warns against confusing the two impulses. “Saying you found a cure on the internet is not helping,” Fox says in the video.
The bigger error, Fox argues, is going silent — worrying so hard about saying the wrong thing that you end up saying nothing at all. His suggested alternative is about as low-stakes as it gets: ask the person to lunch. That is the fourth beat, and the whole campaign’s argument: keep showing up. “Okay, I think I got it,” Ford says, and Fox shakes his hand and declares him officially qualified to be a friend.
A Friendship Built Over Decades
Ford and Fox spent the 1980s in parallel orbits. Ford starred in the “Star Wars” trilogy and the Indiana Jones films; Fox became a household name as Alex P. Keaton on “Family Ties” and a global movie star playing Marty McFly in the “Back to the Future” films. They crossed paths over the years, including at the “A Love Story…Finding A Cure” gala in Beverly Hills on May 8, 2004, a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation benefit that raised about $2 million for stem cell research and honored former First Lady Nancy Reagan for championing it as a route to treatments for Alzheimer’s, which her husband, Ronald Reagan, had. Actress Calista Flockhart, whom Ford married in 2010, was there with him.
They didn’t work together until Season 3 of Apple TV+’s “Shrinking,” which premiered in January 2026 and gave them their first shared screen time as actors. Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, a therapist who has Parkinson’s; Fox appeared in three episodes as Gerry, a fellow patient who meets Paul in a medical waiting room and asks him what he’s in for. The series was co-created by Bill Lawrence, who worked with Fox on “Spin City” from 1996 to 2000. Ford has said he took the storyline extremely seriously, telling People in 2024 that there was no intention to make it into a joke.
Fox promoted the new campaign on Instagram, riffing on one of Indiana Jones’ best-known lines. “It’s not the years that make Harrison and me friends, it’s the mileage,” Fox wrote on Instagram, thanking Ford for helping the foundation spread the word and push toward a cure.
Fox’s Long Fight Against Parkinson’s
Fox was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease in 1991, at 29, and kept the news private for years before going public in 1998. In 2000 he founded The Michael J. Fox Foundation, which has poured $3 billion into Parkinson’s research in the years since. He and his wife of 38 years, actress Tracy Pollan, 66, have long raised money and awareness for the cause.
He won an Emmy in 1987 for “Family Ties” and later took three consecutive Golden Globes — in 1998, 1999 and 2000 — and an Emmy in 2000 for playing Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty on “Spin City,” which he left after its fourth season. Fox formally retired from acting full time in 2020 because of complications from Parkinson’s. His run on “Shrinking” was his first acting role since that retirement, and it earned him an Emmy nomination in 2026. He has also written extensively about living with the disease, including in “Lucky Man,” “Always Looking Up” and “No Time Like the Future,” and revisited his dual-stardom years in the 2025 memoir “Future Boy.”
Public sightings have been rarer in recent years, though not absent: Fox posed for photos with Pollan at the 2025 U.S. Open after arriving in a wheelchair, and turned up as a surprise guest at the 2026 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards with his son Sam. As for whether he’ll return to “Shrinking,” Fox told People in April 2026 that he would do it in a heartbeat, praising Lawrence and the cast. He is due back onstage sooner than that: the Television Academy announced in July that he will receive its 2026 Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards on September 14. The new video is also a curtain-raiser for the foundation’s All Grit. No Quit. campaign, a multi-year drive with a $2.5 billion goal.
