Person off-screen: “The sad sack story is Michael J. Fox gets this debilitating disease and it crushes him.”
Fox: “Yeah, that’s boring.”
On May 12th, Apple TV is releasing Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. I am SO excited to watch this look back at not only his career but his early Parkinson’s journey.
Like many people, Fox felt like he had to hide his condition from the public. No one outside of his family knew for a long time. I’m sure there were many factors to this, but chief among them is ableism.
People won’t hire disabled folks for roles, assuming they can’t do specific actions or out of worry about what to do if the star’s condition worsens. Instead of being able to show up authentically in the workplace, many actors with disabilities have to hide them in order to continue working. In the meantime, they get to deal with tabloid commentary about their weight, appearance, family life, and more.
Perhaps what I’m most excited about is the interaction I opened this post up with – that focusing on a pity party or rooting this film in ableism is boring. It is! “Pity is a benign form of abuse,” Fox has said. He’s not wrong. More than that, films that lean that way act as though disabled folks are already dead, that our lives hold no more meaning.
As he says in the below around the 1:50 mark, “I love the idea that disabled people can be assholes, too.”
It’s beyond refreshing to see someone so well-known rebuke that idea and focus on sharing what real life with his disability is like. We’ve seen that with celebrities who have recently come out with their disabilities, including Selma Blair. It’s nice to see it coming from someone who played such a pivotal role in many of our favorite shows and films from the 80s and 90s.
That’s doubly true when the Michael J. Fox Foundation does such amazing work. This week, they announced a breakthrough in the search for a biomarker for Parkinson’s – “a biological test for Parkinson’s disease that demonstrates high diagnostic accuracy, differentiates molecular subtypes and detects disease in individuals before cardinal movement symptoms arise.” This will lead to early detection and treatment as well as a better understanding of this condition. It will save lives, and it could very well be an important stepping stone to a potential cure or at least better treatments.
Fox had this to say about the discovery: “There are many ways I am involved with the work of the Foundation, but I come to this result first and foremost as a Parkinson’s patient. I am deeply moved by this breakthrough and endlessly grateful to the researchers, study participants and funders who have endeavored to bring us this far. When we started PPMI, we weren’t casting about for fish — we were going after a whale. Now, here we are. Together we are making a cure for Parkinson’s inevitable.”
Fox has won multiple awards for his activism, but I missed him receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award four months ago. If you did, too, it’s worth a watch:
I am so excited to see Fox being more present and better recognized for the work he has done and continues to do.
To close this out, I’ll share another one of my favorite lines in the Still trailer – one that likely won’t surprise you, given the name of this site.
Person off-screen: “What did it mean to be still?”
Fox: “I wouldn’t know. I was never still.”