If anyone can get you to laugh at what it’s like to live with Parkinson’s disease, it’s Michael J. Fox.
A scene from his NBC series “The Michael J. Fox Show” perfectly captures the essence of how a family, very much like Fox’s own, makes light of a medically-challenged moment. As the fictional Henry family sits down to a long-awaited meal, the father (Fox) dishes out scrambled eggs to his wife and three children. Spoon in mid-air, his hand shakes. You think he’s going to drop it, sending breakfast all over the table. Then his wife, Annie (Betsy Brandt), grabs the spoon, saying, “You cannot have a personal victory right now — we are starving.”
The scene with the eggs really happened. Fox, 52, regularly tells stories like this one to the show’s writers that find their way into the scripts. The egg scene is important to him, he says, because, “It’s just a way of saying I’m not the observed patient.
“Parkinson’s is a part of my life and it takes up this much room, and there’s an infinite amount of room around it for [other] things. It’s always going to be there,” he says in a cafe at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “But I have relationships with people, and I know it’s not the first thing they think about. If we’re eating breakfast, they should get the freaking eggs when they want the eggs.”
Face-to-face, Fox is vigorously upbeat. And generous in ways that actors seldom are. After reading an early look at his show in The Post, he says how much it meant to him.
“It was a particularly tough week of shooting and I saw your piece and it made us feel really good,” he says.
He has a way of looking at you so intently that you are not distracted by his body’s involuntary movements. He has been battling Parkinson’s for more than 20 years — he famously left the sitcom “Spin City” in 2006 to deal with it — and takes multiple medications to combat the symptoms. But he’s raised a family with his wife, Tracy Pollan, and has relaunched a career, which, thanks to a recurring role on CBS’s “The Good Wife,” has been on the upswing.
On that show, he played attorney Louis Canning, a wily sort who tried to hire Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) away from her firm. Fox says the role gave him the confidence to pursue a longer series commitment.
“I missed getting a scene and puzzling it out,” he says. “What do I want to do here and how do I get to this place at the end of the scene? Simple stuff like that. It’s falling back into what I do, and the busyness is its own relaxation. It’s relaxing the way a crossword puzzle is relaxing.”
He works 10-to-14 hour days on his new show and has a week off every three weeks. Ten episodes — of a 22-episode, full-season order — are already in the can. An assistant comes with him to the set, but there’s no nurse waiting in the wings.
“It’s not like that. It wouldn’t rise to the level of a stroke or anything,” Fox says. “If I was having a hard time, it would just be that I was uncomfortable and I would just have to wait for 10 minutes or something.”
When Fox came to work on “The Good Wife,” executive producer Brooke Kennedy says she expected someone who would need a lot of attention. “Anything you know about an actor, you prepare for,” she says. “If I have an actor who’s 85, I don’t put him in a dressing room with stairs. We were conscious of his workload and of keeping a dressing room downstairs, close to set. Whatever he’s going through with the disease, I don’t know about. I can see the movements. But he’s just one of the company. He’s very easy with the crew. Once he put his foot in the water, he was back in.”
Fox’s commitment was such that he was back on set in Greenpoint two days after Hurricane Sandy struck. “We were flooded; we had no lights,” Kennedy says. “We jerry-rigged ourselves to work. And Michael and Jules”— Margulies’ nickname on set — “totally led us in how they conducted themselves. It will forever be part of our company, that day.”
He fit in just as easily with his new sitcom company. He knew Wendell Pierce, who plays his boss, from the film “Casualties of War.” “I hadn’t seen him in years,” Fox says. “He was one of the first people we got and I was so thrilled. And Betsy, she totally got the spirit of the wife modeled on Tracy.”
Fox reveals that when the details of the series were being ironed out, he asked Pollan if she wanted to play his TV wife. They thought better of it.
“We decided it would get complicated. We’d be doing the show and then come home and do the show,” he says. “But she said, ‘I’d like to play a neighbor.’ And I said, ‘You’d be a great sexy neighbor.’ And the guys got on it and wrote a great script.”
Even with a full-season order, “The Michael J. Fox Show” needs an audience willing to embrace its star as an individual for whom disease is sometimes a laughing matter. Executive producer Sam Laybourne is confident that audiences will accept Fox as he is.
“This is an old-school family comedy,” Laybourne says. “We talk a lot about Parkinson’s in the pilot so audiences can get used to it. There are so many people who have health issues. And some of the biggest laughs leave a little bit of tears in your eyes.”