Christopher Lloyd has been an older man for most of his career. He first garnered proper fame in the late Carter years as Jim Ignatowski, an addled 1960s survivor, on the classic sitcom Taxi. He was then barely 40, but Jim came across as an amiable ancient. His Doc Brown in Back to the Future offered 1980s kids a surrogate grandfather with a taste for anarchy.
There are advantages to taking such a career path. Mr Lloyd, sipping tea in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel, is now 78, but he barely seems to have aged.
Life is still happening. Just last week, he married for the fifth time. Don’t get the impression that he’s a bolter. Three of the previous marriages lasted more than a decade.
“And my wife and I have been together for about 12 years,” he says in a steady but firm voice. “I think I’m going to hang in there.”
He works. This week you can see him as a suspected murderer in Billy O'Brien's clever, earthy I Am Not a Serial Killer. How did the Irish director lure him into the production?
“The script came to me and, if there’s enough in something to get my teeth into, I’ll do it,” he says. “I like to work. If the material has something tangible then, hopefully, you can make something of it. Somehow the phone keeps ringing.”
Pounding the pavement
Lloyd comes from what we used to call a “good family”. Raised in Connecticut, he is a descendent of a Mayflower passenger. A grandfather helped found Texaco. An uncle was mayor of San Francisco.
“That did mean I didn’t have to wait on tables,” he says with admirable honesty. “I came to New York in 1959 or 1960. I walked the pavements and I did workshops off-off-off Broadway.”
Was he a beatnik? I can see him as a beatnik,
“Ha ha! I can’t really say that. But it went on around me. It was an exciting time to be in New York.”
Lloyd spent a decade and a half moving from smallish roles on Broadway to larger ones on the fringe. He had half an idea that he might finesse his way into cinema, but it wasn't until 1975, when Milos Forman cast him in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that he finally made it onto the big screen. Jack Nicholson was the only real star in the ensemble. Forman fleshed out the cast with newcomers such as Lloyd, Louise Fletcher, Danny DeVito and Brad Dourif.
“Jack was wonderful,” he recalls. “He did his job, but he looked out for the younger guys as well. Forman had an interesting way of conducting the auditions. You didn’t learn any lines. He’d put the chairs around like group therapy and he’d sit in the middle like Nurse Ratched. He’d get us all going and see what we were like.”
Actors will tell you that TV stardom has a different texture to movie stardom. Once people welcome you into their homes, they begin to imagine that you are their friend. Lloyd's New York pals always warned that LA corrupted honest young actors. So he had told his agent not to put him up for sitcoms, but the temptations of Taxi were too potent to resist. The confused, drug-addled Jim came along just as we were realising that the 1960s were becoming history.
“I guess that’s right,” he says. “I remember that stoned-out individual. Everybody knew that person. It might be your brother or your brother’s best friend. Oddly, I’d think of my own brother, who was 22 years older than me. Actually, he didn’t drink and he’d have just one cigarette a day – after dinner. I’d think of his face and that would get me into it.”
Icon in ’85
Lloyd seems to have been admirably relaxed about the fame that came to him in middle age: "It meant things were working out," he shrugs. Further iconic status came with Back to the Future in 1985. Nobody expected much from Robert Zemeckis's time-travel comedy, but the film ended up spawning a lucrative trilogy, an animated series, a host of catchphrases and inevitable talk of revival.
“I’d be happy to do another if that happened,” he says. “I like attending the conventions. You’ll wake up a long way from home and think: where am I? But once you’re at the table signing stuff, it feels good.
“People think the fans are kooks. They’re not. They’re good people and they enjoy meeting people they’ve seen on screen.”
Lloyd doesn’t much fancy the notion of retirement. He recalls encountering Burgess Meredith, then nearly 90, on a film set and noticing how, apparently exhausted, the great actor came to life when the camera approached.
“He suddenly became Burgess Meredith again. If I can hold up that long. I’ll be happy.”
I Am Not a Serial Killer is on release from December 9th.
