In an interview with The Guardian published this weekend, “Back to the Future” star Michael J. Fox compared Donald Trump to Biff Tannen, the main antagonist in the film franchise.
“Every worst instinct in mankind has been played on [by Trump], and for me, that’s just anathema,” Fox told interviewer Hadley Freeman in a conversation held prior to the Nov. 3 election. “Biff is president!”
The actor also described how he felt about Trump mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski during his 2016 presidential run. Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects joint movements, and at the time, Trump quoted the reporter at a rally and jerked his body around erratically. The president later denied that he had committed any wrongdoing.
“When you see your particular group mocked, it’s such a gut punch,” said Fox, who recently announced that he was retiring for a second time due to health concerns. He spent the majority of the interview explaining how Parkinson’s disease has affected his life. “It’s so senseless and cheap. There’s no way I get up in the morning and mock orange people.”
The Biff-Trump comparison came up frequently when Trump was first running for president. In a 2015 interview, screenwriter Bob Gale confirmed that when he and “Back to the Future” director Robert Zemeckis had been drafting ideas for “Back to the Future Part II,” they had used Trump as inspiration for Biff.
In the film, the character runs a grandiose casino, lives in a penthouse reminiscent of the Plaza Hotel, which Trump once owned, and has amassed enough political power to trick regular citizens into calling him “America’s greatest living folk hero.”
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Gale told The Daily Beast. “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.”
Read the full interview with Fox here, courtesy of The Guardian.