Taxi Star Christopher Lloyd on How Life Imitated Art with Reverend Jim

Posted in: ABC, NBC, TV | Tagged: Taxi

Taxi Star Christopher Lloyd on How Life Imitated Art with Reverend Jim

Christopher Lloyd reflects on how life imitated art battling his addiction during his run as Reverend Jim on the ABC-NBC sitcom, Taxi.

Published Sat, 31 Oct 2026 10:37:08 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• Christopher Lloyd says Taxi’s Reverend Jim mirrored his real life as cocaine, alcohol, and pot took hold in Hollywood.
• While promoting In My Own Time, Lloyd recalls how a first cocaine use at Joe Allen quickly became a serious addiction.
• The Taxi star says he never performed high or drunk, but after filming or stage work, his substance abuse intensified.
• Lloyd reflects on Reverend Jim as a hippie-culture burnout, with Taxi storylines often drawing from that drug-fueled era.

It's hard to argue the enduring success of Christopher Lloyd, who went from a promising up-and-coming character actor in Hollywood emerging out of the 1970s to breaking out in one of the most popular characters on prime-time TV in the ABC/NBC sitcom Taxi as "Reverend" Jim "Iggy" Ignatowski, the washed-up Harvard prodigy-turned-spaced-out stoner and driver in New York City. His penchant for comedic timing stood out in an already stacked cast that includes Judd Hirsch, Jeff Conway, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, Randall Carver, Andy Kaufman, and Carol Kane. While promoting his memoir In My Own Time, Lloyd wrote about his struggles with addiction that are played for laughs in his character, in the case of life imitating art in excerpts via Entertainment Weekly

Taxi Star Christopher Lloyd Reflects Battling Addiction While Playing a Fun-Loving Addict on Sitcom

Lloyd described Iggy as "a figure who would have been familiar to certain viewers of that era—a leftover and a burnout of hippie culture who was still trying to hang on to whatever it was he loved about the sixties, as they gave way to the seventies and eighties." Naturally, "sometimes the storylines that involved Jim had to do with drugs, which were part of that culture, too." The Back to the Future star continued describing what he did during the James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed Weinberger-created series. "When I started working in Hollywood, I would often hang out at the Joe Allen restaurant there," Lloyd writes, referencing the NYC establishment in Hell's Kitchen that was frequented by Broadway stars, adding, there was "a young woman who approached me and asked if I wanted to come out to her car and do a snort. She meant cocaine, which at that point I had never tried. I hadn't been out looking for it, but I said all right. We went out to her car and did a couple of lines. That was all it took. I was hooked almost immediately. I loved it, and that was where my cocaine abuse began."

Lloyd dove into how deep his habit was: "Within a couple of years of my arrival in Los Angeles, cocaine, alcohol, and pot had become woven into my life in a serious way. It wasn't just the occasional weekend indulgence. It got entrenched. I never went onstage or in front of a camera high or drunk, because I knew I would lose control of myself. But once the curtain came down or the director said, 'That's a wrap,' all bets were off. I wasn't asking myself what it meant or what it was doing for me. I just knew I liked it, and before long it had a hold on me." For more, you can check out the rest of the article on EW. In My Own Time is available. Taxi, which ran for five seasons from 1978 to 1984, is available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.

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