Christopher Lloyd Opens Up About Decades of Addiction in New Memoir (And the Actors Who Almost Played Doc Brown)

Christopher Lloyd is trading the lab coat for a pen. The 88-year-old actor’s new memoir,“In My Own Time,”is out now, and it reveals a decades-long battle with cocaine and alcohol that began back in the 1970s. Lloyd says he was hooked almost immediately after his first time using cocaine outside a Los Angeles comedy club, and he kept that struggle mostly out of the spotlight while becoming one of the most recognizable faces in pop culture.

The book describes a frightening low point in 1983, just after“Taxi”was canceled, when a drunken argument ended with him punching through windows and losing so much blood he needed plasma and surgery. Lloyd entered rehab in 1993, relapsed several times, and eventually got sober for good. He says he never performed or appeared on camera under the influence.

For“Back to the Future”fans, the book also drops a huge detail: John Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum were both shortlisted to play Doc Brown. Which is a timeline we now need a documentary about. What role can you simply not imagine another actor playing?