Michael J. Fox, who became famous portraying a young Republican activist, slammed one-term president Donald Trump in a new interview, comparing him to the infamous character Biff in the Back to the Future movies.
“Every worst instinct in mankind has been played on by Trump, and for me that’s just anathema. Biff is president!” he said in a broad interview with The Guardian published this past weekend.
“Biff” is the bullying villain from the “Back to the Future” franchise, in which Fox starred as Marty McFly.
Screenwriter Bob Gale, who helped create “Back to the Future Part II,” said the character of Biff was also loosely based on Trump, who, in the years prior to his presidency, had garnered fame as a real estate mogul and reality television star.
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” he said in an interview. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
Of course, in the movie, Biff uses the profits from his 27-story casino (the Trump Plaza Hotel, completed in 1984, is 37 floors, by the way) to help shake up the Republican Party, before eventually assuming political power himself, helping transform Hill Valley, California, into a lawless, dystopian wasteland, where hooliganism reigns, dissent is quashed, and wherein Biff encourages every citizen to call him “America’s greatest living folk hero.”
“Yeah,” says Gale. “That’s what we were thinking about.”
Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, was also pressed for his thoughts on the viral moment from 2016 in which Trump, a Republican presidential candidate at the time, appeared to mock a New York Times reporter who has a disability.
“When you see your particular group mocked, it’s such a gut punch,” he told the outlet. “It’s so senseless and cheap.”
“There’s no way I get up in the morning and mock orange people,” he also said in a swipe at Trump.
The recent comments add to a list of remarks Fox has made taking aim at the president over the years.
In February, when Fox endorsed former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg ahead of the party’s primaries, the actor describe the former mayor as a “very stable Rhodes scholar.”
The comment was a swipe at Trump’s previous description of himself as a “very stable genius.”
“That’s what the J stands for,” he joked at the time, referring to the president’s middle name.
He was also one of a number of Hollywood stars to attend an anti-Trump protest held in place of the United Talent Agency’s regular pre-Oscars party a month after the president’s inauguration in 2017.