Michael J. Fox Remembers “Lying on the Floor, Twisting” While Filming ‘Spin City’ in Apple Doc ‘Still’

The new Michael J. Fox documentary on Apple TV+, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, which is now streaming, provides viewers with insight into Fox’s psyche over the last four decades, and it is both fascinating and heartbreaking.

As the world now knows, Fox was diagnosed with the debilitative and incurable Parkinson’s disease when he was just 29 years old, at the height of his Hollywood career. But though he was diagnosed in 1991—the year after he completed the iconic Back to the Future trilogy—Fox kept his diagnosis a secret from everyone outside of his close family for the next seven years, until he finally went public with his condition in 1998.

During the time between his public disclosure and his diagnosis, Fox kept up a busy career, including roles in movies like Life with Mikey (1993), For Love or Money (1993), and The Frighteners (1996). But his biggest project, filmed while he was struggling daily with the symptoms of Parkinson’s, was the ’90s political sitcom Spin City, starring Fox as the lead role, Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty. In STILL, which features both interview sessions with Fox and narration from his most recent memoir, the 61-year-old recalls how painful it was to hide his disease while filming the sitcom.

“I’d been contorting into intensely uncomfortable positions in order to mask the tremors,” he says in a voice-over, reading from his memoir. “The stress of doing a weekly show in front of a weekly audience was exacerbating my symptoms. The whole of my left arm would be trembling, forceful enough to shake my entire body.” Director Davis Guggenheim and his team compiled a collection of Spin City clips, which show Fox fiddling with his watch, contorting his hand this way and that, shaking his body, and shoving his hands into his pockets.

In his talking head interview with Guggenheim, Fox recalls writhing on the floor of his dressing room, with a studio audience just outside. “I was just lying on the floor twisting, with an audience outside waiting for me to go do a scene. I could not only hear their feet shuffling, I could feel them.”

It was, Fox explains in his memoir, a numbers game of knowing when he had taken his last dose of medication, which would stave off the symptoms and still his shaking limbs. His frustration grew to the point where he would punch holes in his dressing room, he said.

Though he reads about his time on Spin City from his memoir, Fox is less keen to discuss that time in his life with Guggenheim. W”hen I find you talking about the City stuff, I see you sort of get close to it, and then dart away,” Guggenheim notes in the film. “I’ve interviewed you for hours and hours, and you’ve never once told me, ‘I’m in pain.’”

“I’m in pain. I’m in intense pain,” Fox responds. “It didn’t come up. I’m not gonna lead with it!”

STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie is now streaming on Apple TV+.