Michael J. Fox Shares How His Guest Arc on Shrinking Came to Be 5 Years After He Retired from Acting (Exclusive)

Michael J. Fox wasn’t necessarily looking to make a return to TV five years after he retired from acting.

But then he started to watch Shrinking, the Apple TV+ comedy co-created by Fox’s former Spin City colleague Bill Lawrence. On the series, Harrison Ford’s therapist character, Dr. Paul Rhoades, has Parkinson’s, the neurodegenerative disease Fox was diagnosed with in 1991.

After seeing the show, Fox called Lawrence. “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, 64, tells PEOPLE.

“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,” Fox continues.

Fox is staying vague about what concept Lawrence developed, but he says he plays someone with Parkinson’s.

“It was the first time ever I get to show up on-set, and I didn’t have to worry about am I too tired or coughing or anything,” he says. “I just do it. It was really good, because for the moments when I say, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this,’ then I say, ‘Well, I’ll just deal with how I can’t do it in the scene.’ And you get through it,” he says.

Ford, adds five-time Emmy winner Fox, “was so real, so giving, so lovely.” 

The Canada native filmed the three-episode guest arc earlier this year as he was in the “home stretch” of co-writing Future Boy, about his time filming Back to the Future and his NBC sitcom Family Ties simultaneously in 1985.

His co-writer, Nelle Fortenberry, notes that it was Lawrence who brought Fox out of retirement the first time after he left Spin City in 2000.

“He quit Spin City, he was like, ‘I’m done acting.’ And Bill Lawrence was the first person who brought him back,” she says.

“For Scrubs,” adds Fox, who appeared on two episodes of the comedy’s third season in 2004.

Fox continued to act on and off for the next 16 years, appearing on shows like Boston Legal, Rescue Me (for which he won his fifth Emmy) and The Good Wife. 

In his 2020 book No Time Like the Future, he wrote that “work as an actor does not define me” and announced his intention to stop working on screen amid some health struggles related to Parkinson’s.

“The nascent diminishment in my ability to download words and repeat them verbatim is just the latest ripple in the pond,” he wrote. “There are reasons for my lapses in memorization — be they age, cognitive issues with the disease, distraction from the constant sensations of Parkinson’s, or lack of sensation because of the spine — but I read it as a message, an indicator.”

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He told Entertainment Tonight last year that he was open to performing again under the right circumstances. “I would do acting if something came up that I could put my realities into it, my challenges, if I could figure it out,” he said.

Shrinking provided that opportunity, and Fox has said filming the show was a “great experience,” adding “the best part” about it was working with Ford.

The Indiana Jones icon previously praised Fox this summer, calling his presence on set “essential” in a July interview with Variety. “Michael’s courage, his fortitude and his grace, more than anything else, is on full display.”

Does the Shrinking appearance mean Fox is open to future roles? He tells PEOPLE, “We’ll take it one day at a time.”

Future Boy comes out on Oct. 14 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.

For more on Michael J. Fox, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.