Short Male Actors Who Secretly Wear Lifts

Facts

4. Michael J. Fox

Even though Michael J. Fox is one of the entertainment industry’s most successful diminutive actors, clocking in at just 5 feet 4 inches tall, Fox has never been particularly shy about his below average height, in fact it’s become one of the more memorable physical attributes of the actor. However that doesn’t mean that size has never been an issue for him or his co-stars. In fact, when Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in what became Fox’s most famous role in Back to the Future the film’s original female lead, Melora Hardin, was replaced by Lea Thompson, purportedly because Hardin was taller than Fox. But Fox doesn’t seem particularly bothered by his short stature. Once he was joking about Hollywood’s fudging of actor’s heights and said, “When you’re a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you’re a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.”

3. Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Hoffman is another actor who seems to only occasionally sport elevator shoes despite the fact that he’s one of the more diminutive superstars in the entertainment industry. At 5’6″ Dustin usually stands significantly below a lot of his male co-stars and sometimes even below his female co-stars, but in a lot of Dustin’s most famous roles like Midnight Cowboy or Rain Man his small stature played in his favor and in the favor of the character. But sometimes a little bit of a lift was required for the role or simply so the actor could appear on screen with the rest of the cast without looking super small or being partially cut out of the frame, and sometimes it was needed for the sake of making a character more imposing than Hoffman is naturally. For instance, when Dustin played the titular role of Captain Hook in Hook a set of lifts were included in his character makeover to complete the look of the evil pirate.