Thursday, November 05, 2026
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There are few actors working today with stories as inspiring as Michael J. Fox. For over thirty years since his diagnosis, the Back to the Future star has refused to let Parkinson’s slow him down. And in the latest episode of “What I’ve Learned” below, Fox tells Esquire that the fight is still ongoing.—Josh Rosenberg, editor, news & entertainment
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“My parents were risk averse,” the 65-year-old Back to the Future actor says. “But I wanted to do all this crazy stuff.”
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Michael J. Fox is a fighter. When the Back to the Future and Spin City actor was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991, he refused to let the condition cut his life or his career short. He kept acting, earned some Emmy Awards and Golden Globes statuettes, and most recently appeared on season 3 of Apple TV’s Shrinking with Harrison Ford.
As the 65-year-old actor tells Esquire editor-in-chief Michael Sebastian in the latest episode of “What I’ve Learned,” his drive all stems from a quote his father told him when he left Canada to pursue acting in America: “Well, if you’re going to be a lumberjack, you might as well go to the goddamn forest.”
Though Fox’s father, a former Canadian Armed Forces soldier, was likely talking about Hollywood, Fox says that he took his advice to mean that if you’re going to do anything in life—whether it be his acting, his activism, or even his sheer optimism in the face of disease—you better fully engage yourself in it.
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Halloween is in the rearview, Daylight Saving Time is over, and the sun has decided it has better places to be (although I am grateful for that extra hour of sleep we got). You know what all that means: It’s officially time to bring out the poofy coats, the cable-knit sweaters, and the winter scents. We’re talking spicy, smoky, sophisticated, and a little dark. Think of it as the olfactory equivalent of a cashmere scarf or quilted jacket. But before you reach for the same old colognes of winters past, consider making room for something new in your fragrance rotation.
Allow me to suggest my new cold-weather go-to, released just last month by one of my all-time favorite niche fragrance houses, Fulton & Roark. This extrait has a pretty sick name: Cathedral of Ruins—and it smells every bit as atmospheric as you’d hope for with a name like that. It’s moody without being gloomy, warm without being cloying, and oh-so intriguing. Put a spritz of this stuff on and you’re guaranteed to start hearing the words, What are you wearing?
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For Bill Lawrence, producing some of TV’s biggest comedies is serious business. Once the architect of cable juggernauts Scrubs and Cougar Town, the 57-year-old producer is now at the helm of several streaming-era darlings, including Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Rooster, and Bad Monkey. But of all his shows, Lawrence tells Esquire that Bad Monkey scratches a specific itch.
“My favorite movies, books, and TV shows that grabbed me as a kid melted genres,” Lawrence says. “People remember them as raucous comedies, and they were. But there were real emotional stakes,” says Lawrence. “And the first author that got me into that stuff was Carl Hiaasen.” A political journalist and author from Florida, Hiaasen wrote the satirical crime novel Bad Monkey in 2013. The book was adapted in full in 2024 as the Apple TV series’ first season. Lawrence was, and is, a “massive fan” of Hiaasen’s. “Then I got to know this guy,” he says.
“That one of my heroes turned out to be like I hoped he would be, and that he let me take one of his best properties and turn it into a little bit of throwback TV—it’s one of the most fun rides of my career.”
Now Lawrence is ready to unpack the upcoming second season of Bad Monkey—and its Emmy-worthy newcomers—which returns to Apple TV on December 2.
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