Melora Hardin has recalled being dumped from Back to the Future after a last-minute casting change.
The American actress, 58, is best known for playing Jan Leinson on The Office, and starring in other series’ including Monk, Transparent and The Bold Type.
Beginning her career aged just six, early roles came in Thunder, The Love Boat and Little House on the Prairie, with Hardin since going on to appear in over 70 movies and TV shows.
However, before all this, her career was set to reach new heights when she was cast as Jennifer Parker in Robert Zemeckis’ sci-fi film Back to the Future in the 1980s. She’d also signed a two-picture deal to appear in any sequel.
At the time, the lead role of Marty McFly was set to be played by Eric Stoltz, who was then best known for featuring in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Surf II and The Wild Life.
The two young actors had already shot several weeks of the film together. But after clashing with the director over their approaches to the film – Zemeckis saw it as a sci-fi comedy, while Stoltz saw it as a tragedy – the lead star was fired.
That decisions also had serious implications for Hardin. After Family Ties actor Michael J. Fox stepped in the starring role, the actress was then deemed too tall to appear alongside him as she was eight inches taller.
Like her co-star, she then also lost the job, being replaced with Claudia Wells.
Now, 40 years on, Hardin has spoken about the impact of being booted from that set.
‘Back to the Future was a huge disappointment. I was 17, you know. I burst into tears,’ she recently recalled in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
‘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.’
Earlier this year, she detailed how it was ‘apparently the two female executives at the time that thought that it was emasculating for their lead male character to be in scenes with a woman that was taller than him’.
But, she added: ‘If I had done it, I’m sure it would have all gone in a different way. I wouldn’t have done The Office.’
In her recent chat with EW, Hardin also explained that ‘to be where I am, you have to have failed more than you’ve succeeded’.
‘I think people don’t realise 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.’
Since losing out on her Back to the Future role, Hardin has appeared in films including 27 Dresses, 17 Again and Hannah Montana: The Movie, as well as shows like Gilmore Girls and Scandal.
In a recent chat with the same publication, Fox also discussed being rushed in to replace Stoltz.
‘I didn’t have time to think about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the public was aware of it until we were doing it. I was rushed on it, six weeks in, and I had no kind of time to talk about it,’ he said.
He also wrote about Hardin’s recasting in his memoir, Future Boy.
‘My goal as a child was self-preservation. Bullies often ridiculed my height, an easy target. I suffered the indignity of short jokes and prejudice against my smallness,’ he began.
‘My height worked in my favour when I was a teenage actor playing a younger kid, but it turned against me as an adult, when I went up for romantic leads opposite taller actresses.’
Noting that Hollywood was ‘heighest’, he continued: ‘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 said that Zemeckis initially thought the audience could get over the height different 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’.
‘No one asked for my opinion, but I would have risen to Melora’s defence,’ Fox added, also writing he didn’t feel any need to be taller than his co-stars. ‘The only thing I was interested in elevating was the quality of my work,’ he explained.
After being cast as Marty’s love interest, Wells then faced being replaced herself in the Back to the Future sequels. Following the film’s huge success at the box office, Elisabeth Shue played Jennifer in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III in 1990.
Although Stoltz has largely avoided discussing being dropped from Back to the Future, he did tell Moviehole in a 2007 interview: ‘I rarely look back, if at all, but in retrospect, I think just getting through that difficult period helped me realise how freeing it really was.
‘I went back to acting school, I moved to Europe, I did some plays in New York, and I actually invested in myself in a way that was much healthier for me. I would’ve been unable to walk down the street!
‘It’s a whole different life. I was lucky in that way.’
The casting drama didn’t lead to a huge falling out between he and Fox either, with the latter writing in his memoir that ‘what transpired had not made us enemies or fated rivals’.
‘We were just two dedicated actors who had poured equal amounts of energy into the same role. The rest had nothing to do with us.’
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