Two actresses played Jennifer Parker in the Back to the Future trilogy. Claudia Wells first took on the role in the original, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, and then Elisabeth Shue succeeded her in the next two movies. But as it turns out, an actress from The Office, one of the best sitcoms of all time, was originally going to play Jennifer in Back to the Future, though she was fired for a specific reason after Michael J. Fox came aboard.
As many Back to the Future fans know, Fox was tapped to take over playing Marty McFly from Eric Stoltz when it was determined after six weeks of filming that Stoltz wasn’t a good fit for the role after all. Unfortunately, Melora Hardin, who played Jan Levinson on The Office, ended up being collateral damage from this decision, as she was let go after having already shot multiple scenes with Stoltz. The actress recalled in an interview with EW:
Back to the Future was a huge disappointment. 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.
When Back to the Future came along, Melora Hardin had already appeared in the movie The North Avenue Irregulars and TV shows like The Love Boat, Diff’rent Strokes and Little House on the Prairie. She was expecting the Robert Zemeckis-directed sci-fi film to be a big boost for career, but that changed with the Marty McFly recasting. Why? As both Hardin recalled earlier this year and Michael J. Fox mentioned in his new memoir Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum, two female studio executives felt that Fox was too short to star opposite Hardin, deeming it “emasculating” for a lead male character.
Although this professional opportunity didn’t work out, Melora Hardin has taken a more positive view on what happened. In her mind, if she had played Jennifer Parker, her career would have gone in a different direction and she “wouldn’t have done The Office.” Hardin continued:
To be where I am, you have to have failed more than you've succeeded. 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.
For his part, Michael J. Fox expressed regret in his memoir that this “prejudice” over height affected Melora Hardin. However, if starring in Back to the Future would have indeed resulted in her starring in much different movies and TV shows, I think fans of The Office can be happy with how this turned out. Hardin did a great job playing Jan opposite Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott in seven of the show’s nine seasons, so it’s hard to imagine who would have done just as good a job, if not better, in the role.
The Back to the Future movies can all be streamed for free over at Pluto TV at the time of this writing. If you’d like to revisit Melora Hardin’s time on The Office, that show is accessible with a Peacock subscription.
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