Hollywood has been abuzz this week over revelations concerning the “recasting of the cast” of Back to the Future way back in the past—1985, to be exact. According to an interview with GQ that hit the newsstands on Monday, Christopher Lloyd was originally not at all pleased that Eric Stoltz’s head rolled to be replaced with Michael J Fox’s.

For the memory-impaired, Stoltz got canned after the film had been in production for nearly two months when the Future moguls concluded he was miscast for the role. Lloyd, who played the role of Dr. Emmett Brown, revealed how he was initially upset at the decision: “They just decided they needed somebody with a comic flair. Stoltz is a wonderful actor. I had no idea the change was coming. My biggest fear, because I was really working to get Doc right, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can get it up to do [all the scenes over] again.’ So I was worried about it. But, it all worked out.”

The GQ story recounts the abrupt fashion in which Lloyd and his fellow cast members got the news of the change. “One night we were shooting the mall beginning sequence, and we were asked to come to one of the trailers at one o’clock in the morning,” he recalled. “Spielberg was there and he made the announcement of the change.

Stoltz’s resume had included appearances in Running Hot and The Wild Life. Also in 1985, he appeared as the lead in Mask, which featured Cher as leading actress. He later had a stellar career playing major roles in such films as The Fly, Pulp Fiction, Say Anything, and Some Kind of Wonderful. He also appeared in the TV series Mad About You.

Despite his initial misgivings, Lloyd says he maintained a friendship with Stoltz that has lasted over the years. He also told GQ how much Back to the Future meant to him personally: “Kids who saw it when the film first came out, grew up and had kids who they began their lives with it. So many people have come up to me to say how I’ve made their childhood, or the film made their childhood, or they became engineers or scientists or surgeons or whatever from the effect of the film on them. Nothing else I’ve done has had that kind of impact.”

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