‘Back to the Future’ Star’s Secret Struggle Revealed
The Emmy-winning actor made a candid confession.
FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images
Back to the Future star Christopher Lloyd has revealed his years-long struggle with cocaine and alcohol addiction.
In his new memoir, In My Own Time: A Memoir, the 88-year-old actor said his first “snort” of cocaine was in Los Angeles in the ‘70s, reports Page Six. Lloyd writes that he went to a car with a woman he had just met at a comedy club and “did a couple of lines.”
Christopher Lloyd played Emmett “Doc” Brown in "Back to the Future."
Eric Liebowitz/Disney General Entertainment Con
“That was all it took. I was hooked almost immediately. I loved it, and that was where my cocaine abuse began,” Lloyd, known for playing Emmett “Doc” Brown in the Back to the Future series, said.
Lloyd revealed that his use of cocaine, alcohol, and pot quickly became “entrenched”: “I wasn’t asking myself what it meant or what it was doing for me,” he explained. “I just knew I liked it, and before long it had a hold on me.”
Following back-to-back Emmy wins for his role on “Taxi,” Lloyd transitioned to film, starring as Klingon Commander Kruge, a villain seeking to acquire the technology to terraform an entire planet, in the 1984 film “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”
Paramount Pictures/CBS
The Emmy-winning actor added that he never appeared on camera while under the influence.
He outlined one particular incident as indicative of his addiction. When the television series Taxi was canceled in 1983 after five seasons, he had an argument with his then girlfriend while high and drunk. After spending the night away, he returned home to find that she had locked him out. He began punching the windows.
“The next thing I remember, I was lying on the floor of my kitchen, bleeding out, and paramedics were attending to me,” he recalled. “I later learned that I had lost so much blood that they had to give me plasma.” He had to undergo surgery and physical therapy in the aftermath.
Lloyd entered rehab in 1993. “That was the beginning, but not the end of it,” Lloyd wrote. “I relapsed a few times after that.”
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The actor shared that he finally did give up on his addictions. “Some years later, on April 1,” he shared, “I got sober for what turned out to be the last time.”
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