Michael J. Fox Lands Emmy Nom for ‘Shrinking’ After Ending His Five-Year Acting Retirement

Michael J. Fox has landed an Emmy nomination for his guest-star role on Apple TV’s “Shrinking,” a part he came out of five years of acting retirement for last year.

When the 78th annual Emmy Award nominations were revealed Wednesday, Fox was among a list of outstanding guest actor in a comedy series candidates that also included Brett Goldstein (another “Shrinking” actor), Hamish Linklater (“Widow’s Bay”), Christopher McDonald (“Hacks”), Rob Reiner (“The Bear”) and “Heated Rivalry” star Connor Storrie (for hosting “SNL”).

Before the third season of “Shrinking” debuted in late January, Fox said during an interview with the Los Angeles Times that his decision to quit acting in 2020 “was non-emotional and kind of OK.”

Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991 and publicly announced his condition in 1998. He was the star of the ABC sitcom “Spin City” at the time, a show he gave up in 2000 during the show’s fourth season because his Parkinson’s symptoms were already making it difficult to be on set. That was the first time Fox retired (the actor has since joked that he’s “always retiring”), although he was ultimately lured back to acting by “Spin City” co-creator Bill Lawrence for “Scrubs.”

“I did the show and I loved it and [had] all these great offers for things — I discovered this new niche, which is do characters that had some kind of flaw and taking my Parksinsonian issues and translate that into cancer on ‘Boston Legal’ and a form of Parkinsonism on ‘The Good Wife,'” Fox told the LA Times.

Last October, Fox revealed to People he was actually the one who reached out to Lawrence about appearing on “Shrinking”: “I said, ‘You did a show about Parkinson’s, and you didn’t call me?’ And he said, ‘Oh, you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘I’d love to do it,’” Fox said. “So he said, ‘Let me think about it, see what I can do.’ So he went to work on it and came up with this concept, it’s really good.”