“So how are you feeling about this whole ‘Fuck Parkinson’s’ thing?” I asked Michael J. Fox, as I took my seat in his office on the Upper East Side of New York.
“I like it,” he replied. “I like the defiance of it.”
In case you missed it—and I hope you didn’t—TV viewers heard Fox utter those memorable words a week and a half ago, during the first episode of season three of the Apple TV show Shrinking.
One of the show’s main characters, Paul, played by Harrison Ford, is a curmudgeonly psychologist who has Parkinson’s. As season 3 begins, he has clearly deteriorated: His hands shake uncontrollably, and he has trouble doing simple tasks like brushing his teeth. In the waiting room of his neurologist’s office, he meets Gerry, played by Fox, whose condition is far worse than Paul’s. But when Paul tells Gerry he feels stupid complaining about his problems to someone whose symptoms are so much worse, Gerry reassures him. “We’re all on the same shitty train to Sucksville,” he says.
