After 40 years, Melora Hardin doesn’t need a time machine to remember how it felt being fired from Back to the Future.
Following Micheal J. Fox‘s account of her dismissal from the role of his romantic lead Jennifer Parker, the actress admitted she “burst into tears” when she was cut from the 1985 movie for being taller than Fox’s Marty McFly.
“Back to the Future was a huge disappointment,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I was 17, you know. I burst into tears. It was very sad. There were quite a few of those that I remember, you know, things that never really got made. But that I remember being very tough.”
Hardin explained, “To be where I am, you have to have failed more than you’ve succeeded. I think people don’t realize that when they look at it from the outside — you have to really be somebody who’s comfortable with failure, and with putting yourself on the line all the time. That failure doesn’t mean anything about you. You just have to fail better, and keep failing better … to be able to really weather this career choice.”
In his recent memoir Future Boy, Fox explained that when he replaced leading man Eric Stoltz as the time-traveling teen, some felt co-star Hardin was suddenly too tall to play the character’s girlfriend in the franchise’s first installment.
Michael J. Fox, Claudia Wells and Christopher Lloyd in ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) (Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Noting that his height “worked in my favor when I was a teenage actor playing a younger kid,” Fox wrote that being short “turned against me as an adult, when I went up for romantic leads opposite taller actresses.”
Fox continued, “I regret that this prejudice inadvertently affected another cast member in Back to the Future – Melora Hardin, the talented actress who had played Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, opposite the perfectly tall Eric Stoltz.
“Melora, several inches taller than me, was replaced in the movie after I took over as Marty,” he added. “Initially, Bob Zemeckis thought perhaps the audience could look past our height difference, but when he quickly surveyed the female members of the crew, they assured him that the tall pretty girl in high school rarely picks the cute short guy.”
“No one asked for my opinion, but I would have risen to Melora’s defense,” added Fox.
After Claudia Wells stepped in to play Jennifer in Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 time-travel comedy, Elisabeth Shue took over the role in Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Part III (1990).
