Melora Hardin recalls what it was like to be sacked from Back to the Future forty years later.
After Michael J. Fox’s story of her removal from the role of his love interest, Jennifer Parker, the actress said she “burst into tears” after being dropped from the 1985 film because she was taller than Fox’s Marty McFly.
She told Entertainment Weekly, “Back to the Future was a huge disappointment. 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 added, “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.”
According to Fox’s recent memoir Future Boy, some people thought co-star Hardin was too tall to play the character’s love in the first film in the trilogy when he took Eric Stoltz’s place as the time-traveling youngster. Fox noted that being small “turned against me as an adult, when I went up for romantic leads opposite taller actresses,” even though his height “worked in my favor when I was a teenage actor playing a younger kid.”
“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,” Fox went on.
“Melora, several inches taller than me, was replaced in the movie after I took over as Marty,” he continued. “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.”
