“My brother was so funny at the dinner table that you’d wait for what he had to say.” Fox said.
#Alex p. keaton. tv#
You see he’s just this scared kid.”ĭuring an interview with Emmy TV Legends, Fox said he also based the character on his smart-ass brother, who had great timing. That’s the great fun of playing Alex: he is a kid who’s putting on all this stuff, and when it was really effective was when you see him naked. You’re trying to be somebody else, and really what it is, is trying to take stuff off. “What I learned about acting, especially doing that show, is that I thought of acting, when I was younger, as something you put on a character. And then the fun was watching him react to that and recover from that and hoist himself back up to that place where he thought he was.”įox said he saw a lot of himself in Alex, and that the role taught him quite a bit about acting. “He looked amazing, he felt good about what he presented to the world, but you could poke your finger through it any time you wanted to. On Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton asked Fox, “Who is Alex Keaton?” “I always thought of him like a mansion made out of rice paper,” Fox replied.
And as soon as he left, I turned to Judith and I said, ‘This kid’s great. He just played who he was, he played another side. “So, calls him in, and I say, ‘Anything you want me to tell you?’ He goes, ‘No, just do it better, huh?’ And he gives me this little smile, and I’m thinking, ‘Matthew who?’ It was like ‘boom.’ He nailed it. “And Mike is such a gifted actor that he could make his choices very specific, and he could play any role any way, and he had made a very specific choice that day in the room at Paramount to play the darker side of Alex Keaton, and it didn’t work.”īut casting director Judith Weiner kept hounding Goldberg to cast him, and finally Goldberg agreed to see Fox again. “I just thought, ‘No,’” Goldberg later told Emmy TV Legends.
Fox’s audition tape but didn’t feel he was right for the role. Keaton, but Broderick turned down the part as he didn’t want to move to L.A. Gary David Goldberg saw an audition tape of Matthew Broderick and wanted to cast him Alex P. Matthew Broderick was the creator's first choice for Alex P.
#Alex p. keaton. series#
Family Ties's series finale aired 30 years ago, on May 14, 1989, with Alex moving to New York City to take a job-though not before giving his family a heartfelt goodbye.ĭecades later the show is remembered for the Keatons’s wit, and the warm, fuzzy family values it enacted. Despite its success, Goldberg decided to call it quits after seven seasons. “I don’t know if there was anything the wanted to do that the network said no to.”įamily Ties quickly became a ratings juggernaut a third of all American households watched the show. “The show was more focused on getting Humanitas Awards than Emmys,” co-star Justine Bateman told Entertainment Weekly in 2015. Loosely based on Goldberg’s life, Family Ties was grounded in comedy, but also tackled intense issues such as alcoholism, incest, and death. To capitalize on the dearth of family-oriented sitcoms, Gary David Goldberg created a show for NBC about Columbus, Ohio-based couple-and former liberal hippies-Elyse and Steven Keaton, who were now raising three (later four) kids, one of whom was a Reagan-loving young Republican named Alex P. Back then NBC was struggling a bit in the ratings: its famed Thursday night comedy block hadn’t started yet, and sitcoms about nuclear families were scarce.
In 1982, thanks to Ronald Reagan, America was becoming more conservative.