Mary Steenburgen is celebrating a friendship that’s spanned nearly five decades.
The 73-year-old actress shared a series of photos on Instagram featuring her and Christopher Lloyd, 87, including a recent snapshot alongside throwback images from over the years, reflecting on how their bond first formed on the set of 1978’s Goin’ South, well before they reunited as love interests in Back to the Future Part III.
“It was so lovely to see my longtime friend, Chris Lloyd and his beautiful wife, Lisa, recently. Chris was in the very first scene I shot in my career,” Steenburgen wrote in her caption.
She recalled how daunting that early experience was, having landed the lead role opposite Jack Nicholson, who directed and starred in the film, despite having no prior film experience.
“It was a film called Goin’ South directed by and starring Jack Nicholson. I was a very scared 24-year-old who had gone from zero films to the lead in a film opposite the biggest star of that time. I had never even been out of the country and got my first passport so I could travel to Durango, Mexico, where the film was shot,” she said.
Steenburgen credited Lloyd with easing her nerves during that overwhelming introduction to the industry.
“All this is to say that there, in Mexico, a scared, brand-new newbie in film found a friend in Chris Lloyd who could not have been kinder to me. He was funny and reassuring and was a person I could turn to ask the embarrassing questions,” she wrote, recalling some of the questions she leaned on him for, including how to hit her marks without looking down and who her friends would even be in a life no longer defined by being a struggling actor.
The two reunited more than a decade later in Back to the Future Part III, with Steenburgen playing Clara Clayton opposite Lloyd’s Doc Brown.
That film held its own significance for Lloyd, who confided in director Robert Zemeckis that he’d never actually kissed a woman on screen before.
“This is the first time in my career I’ve ever kissed a girl on screen,” he told The Roanoke Times in a 1995 interview, adding, “I did have a sort of romance in Star Trek III, but this is the first humanly possible relationship I’ve had in a movie.”
Steenburgen has been married to Ted Danson since 1995, while Lloyd has been married to Lisa Loiacono since 2016.
In a separate recent interview, Steenburgen also looked back on the physical demands of filming Back to the Future Part III, particularly its high-energy train sequence.
She recalled training extensively for the scene, only for plans to change at the last minute.
“That whole sequence riding up to the train on my horse, which I trained for, because, turns out horses don’t want to go between a train and a camera truck, especially if it’s a steam engine, but I trained for that and then the night before we went, the wrangler said, ‘I’m switching horses with you,'” she said.
The swap worked out in her favour: “And he made the right choice, because the second I got on this horse, I went, ‘Oh, this horse is gonna do it,’ and we galloped up to the back of the train. And that’s me touching it and then my brilliant stand-in doing the transfer.”
She noted that the most challenging part of the stunt wasn’t the more dramatic moments audiences might expect.
“The hardest part of all that was not the hanging upside down or any of that. It was walking across the top of the train, which had tons of logs and stuff. And they cleared a little path for me but it was hard to stay on the path.”
