Michael J Fox left Whoopi Goldberg thunderstruck this Thursday by revealing he turned down a role in her 1990 hit Ghost.
The movie starred Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore as a couple called Sam and Molly whose romance is torn apart when he gets killed as part of a criminal plot.
Sam lingers on Earth as a ghost and sets out to protect Molly from the miscreants with the help of a sham psychic played by Whoopi, who won an Oscar for the role.
During an appearance on The View this week, Michael, 61, who was born nearly a decade later than Patrick, dished that he was approached for the picture.
‘There was a chance to work with you that I missed,’ he told Whoopi, spilling that when the idea for Ghost was floated to him he said: ‘It’ll never work.’
Candor: Michael J. Fox left Whoopi Goldberg thunderstruck this Thursday by revealing he turned down a role in her 1990 movie Ghost
Whoops: ‘There was a chance to work with you that I missed,’ he told Whoopi, spilling that when the idea for Ghost was floated to him he said: ‘It’ll never work’
Michael, who became a major movie star in the 1980s, warmly added that Ghost ‘was great and huge – and I’m a f***ing idiot!’
During a wide-ranging interview that ran in Variety last week, Michael explained that dismissed the idea of being in Ghost because he ‘didn’t see how it would work.’
Defying his doubts, Ghost turned out to be a runaway smash and became the highest-grossing movie of a year that included Pretty Woman and Home Alone.
By that point Michael had established himself as a top-flight name in Hollywood, first on TV with Family Ties and then on the big screen with Back To The Future.
He made his own foray into the ghost movie genre with the 1996 picture The Frighteners, directed by Peter Jackson before his The Lord Of The Rings fame.
Michael was appearing on The View this week to promote his new Apple TV documentary Still, which follows his battle with Parkinson’s.
Directed by Bill Guggenheim, whose work includes documentaries on Bill Gates and Malala Yousafzai, Still was released last Friday.
‘Michael calls Parkinson’s “the gift that keeps on taking,” and there’s something to that. Because there’s a clarity you get when you have this kind of horrible chronic diagnosis,’ Bill remarked in last week’s Variety profile of his star.
Star-crossed lovers: The movie starred Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore as a couple called Sam and Molly whose romance is torn apart when he gets killed as part of a criminal plot
Triumph: Sam lingers on Earth as a ghost and sets out to protect Molly from the miscreants with the help of a sham psychic played by Whoopi, who won an Oscar for the role
Runaway success: Defying initial expectations, Ghost turned out to be a runaway smash, becoming the highest-grossing movie of a year that included Pretty Woman and Home Alone
‘There’s a kind of relentless degradation that comes with Parkinson’s. But what’s amazing about Michael is that all those falls and all those trips to the hospital could have turned him bitter. But, weirdly, it’s only made him more self-assured and openhearted,’ the filmmaker marveled.
Meanwhile Whoopi at the moment is recovering from a scandalous phase of her career, owing to her crackpot remarks on the Holocaust.
In early 2022 she set off a media firestorm after bizarrely claiming that the Holocaust was not about ‘race’ as ‘these are two white groups of people!’
The Holocaust was based on Nazi theories of race science that classified certain groups, including Jews, as ‘untermenschen’ – ‘subhumans.’
She faced an international deluge of backlash and was suspended for two weeks from her long-running hosting gig on The View.
In the initial wave of blowback, Whoopi issued an apology saying she ‘stands corrected’ and was ‘sorry for the hurt I have caused.’
However she swiftly did a U-turn, discussing the Holocaust with Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show and declaring: ‘You can’t call this racism.’
Whoopi provoked a fresh round of backlash in December when she told the Times Of London that the Holocaust ‘wasn’t originally’ about race as the first victims were ‘people they considered to be mentally defective.’
Stardom: By that point Michael had established himself as a top-flight name in Hollywood, first on TV with Family Ties and then on the big screen with Back To The Future (pictured)
Details: He made his own foray into the ghost movie genre with the 1996 picture The Frighteners (pictured), directed by Peter Jackson before his The Lord Of The Rings fame
She further remarked that ‘you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making.’
Confronted with another surge of controversy, Whoopi maintained: ‘It was never my intention to appear as if I was doubling down on hurtful comments.’
The Sister Act star was originally called Caryn Johnson but adopted Whoopi Goldberg as her stage name and has insisted she has Jewish heritage.
Meanwhile historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has hosted such ancestry-themed TV shows as African American Lives and Finding Your Roots, dug into Whoopi’s family history and was unable to find any Jewish relations.
Some reports have alleged she adopted the surname Goldberg because her mother told her she could increase her chances in Hollywood by seeming Jewish.
