You were not alone in that belief. Someone else said the same thing. His name was Max Wright, incidentally. Sadly, he passed away in 2019. He is occasionally confused with Austin Pendleton, Max from The Muppet Movie, who has the same name as Max Wright, which doesn’t help. To make things even more confusing, they were once in the same movie- Simon*, which came out in 1980. Austin is, thankfully, still with us.
*It’s like K-PAX if the psychiatrist was the one who convinced the guy he was an alien.