Most cinephiles will agree that Back to the Future is among the greatest movies of all time. It’s a perfect storm that needed every aspect to be just as it was for the classic movie to come out so well, and a big part of that relied on its stellar casting. It’s well known at this point that Eric Stoltz was replaced during production by Michael J. Fox as he just didn’t feel right as Marty McFly, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as known that Ghostbusters star Harold Ramis could have been a part of that original cast as well.
In recent years, a casting sheet from the original Back to the Future movie has been making the rounds online. It reveals a list of actors under consideration to play Emmett “Doc” Brown, listed as “Scientist” on the sheet. There are many interesting names that have been crossed out, including John Lithgow, Robin Williams, Gene Wilder, Steve Martin, John Candy, and Danny DeVito. The names which aren’t crossed out, including Christopher Lloyd, presumably came closer to landing that role, with some of those names including Jeff Goldblum, Gene Hackman, and John Cleese.
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Curiously, penciled in at the top of this list is the name Harold Ramis. This would suggest that those involved had him in mind as a good enough candidate for the role to write his name down as they were still zoning in on their Doc. Ultimately, the Back to the Future team saw the most potential in Christopher Lloyd and really wanted him for the part. As wonderful as Ramis and so many of the other names on that list might have been as actors, Lloyd makes it obvious just how perfect he is for that role very quickly into his performance in Back to the Future.
Lloyd is now synonymous with Doc Brown, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. While director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale have been firm with their decision that Back to the Future will never be rebooted or given another sequel, Lloyd has said for many years how he’d love to return as Doc in a potential Back to the Future 4. For better or for worse, no plans for a fourth Back to the Future movie are in the works, despite the success of other legacy sequels in recent years.
“We told a complete story with the trilogy,” Gale told Collider last year. “You don’t want to see Back to the Future without Michael J. Fox [who’s now retired]. People say, ‘Well, do it with somebody else.’ Really? Who are you going to get? All you’re gonna do is beg comparisons to the originals, and you’re not going to match up.”
He added, “We didn’t want to be those guys who did a movie that was basically a moneygrab. Universal says to us, ‘You’d guys would make a whole lot of money,’ but we’re like, ‘Well, we’ve already made a whole lot of money with these movies, and we like them just the way they are. And as proud parents, we’re not going to sell our kids into prostitution.'”
Harold Ramis is of course best known for his role as Egon Spengler in the Ghostbusters series. While Ramis passed away in 2014, his Egon character plays a big part in the new sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife which follows Egon’s daughter and granddaughter forming a new team as original stars from the first two Ghostbusters movies also return. The movie is now playing in theaters.
