Melora Hardin recently opened up on losing the role of Jennifer Parker, Marty McFly’s girlfriend, all because she happened to be taller than Michael J. Fox. She was only 17 at the time, and the news hit her hard.
“Back to the Future was a huge disappointment,” Hardin told Entertainment Weekly. “I was 17, you know. I burst into tears. 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.”
It is one of those Hollywood stories that sounds absurd until you realize how common it actually is. Height differences, chemistry tests, last minute casting changes. The business chews people up constantly, and Hardin got caught in the machinery early.
But she has made peace with it in her own way. Hardin explained that failure is just part of the job if you want to survive in this industry. You have to get comfortable with rejection, with putting yourself out there over and over, knowing most of the time it won’t work out.
“To be where I am, you have to have failed more than you’ve succeeded,” she said. “I think people don’t realize 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.”
The whole mess started when Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly. Stoltz was the original lead, and Hardin had been cast as his girlfriend Jennifer. They looked fine together on screen. But once Fox stepped in, suddenly the optics changed. Fox was shorter, and some people involved with the production thought Hardin’s height made the pairing look awkward.
Fox himself wrote about this in his recent memoir Future Boy, and he didn’t hold back. He acknowledged that his height had actually helped him early on when he played younger characters, but it turned into a problem when he went after romantic leads opposite taller actresses.
“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 wrote.
He explained what happened behind the scenes: “Melora, several inches taller than me, was replaced in the movie after I took over as Marty. Initially, Bob Zemeckis thought perhaps the audience could look past our height difference, 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.”
Director Robert Zemeckis apparently did a quick poll among the women working on set, and they all agreed that audiences wouldn’t buy a tall girl going for a short guy in high school. It’s depressing how something so superficial can derail someone’s career moment, but that’s the calculation Hollywood makes constantly.
Fox added one more thing that gives the whole story a bittersweet edge: “No one asked for my opinion, but I would have risen to Melora’s defense.”
After Hardin got cut, Claudia Wells stepped into the role for the 1985 film. Then Elisabeth Shue took over for Back to the Future Part II and Part III in 1989 and 1990. The franchise became a massive hit, one of the biggest of the decade, and Hardin watched it all happen from the sidelines.
It’s the kind of what if moment that could eat someone alive, but Hardin clearly learned to live with it. She kept working, kept auditioning, kept failing better like she said. That’s probably the only way to survive in a business where your height can cost you a role in a cultural phenomenon.
