“What great career advice”: did Scientology ask John Travolta to turn down ‘Pulp Fiction’?
One of the more amusing developments of 2026, alongside Jordan Henderson managing to get a yellow card and an injury at the World Cup without having played a game, has to be the brief but excellent trend of ‘Scientology speedrunning’.
It has seen kids on TikTok barging into Scientology buildings en masse and filming themselves getting as far as they could before being turfed out by very upset people in shirts and ties. It’s the kind of behaviour you could imagine important Hollywood people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta getting particularly annoyed about, especially since the latter is a lifelong member of the secretive church, having joined up all the way back in 1975 when he was filming a horror movie called The Devil’s Rain and was given the founder L Ron Hubbard’s book Dianetics by a co-star.
Travolta has been one of the most high-profile figures related to the church ever since and has credited it with helping him have the successful movie career he’s enjoyed, plus recovering from the death of his 16-year-old son Jett back in 2009. But his history with the organisation hasn’t all been plain sailing; there were the rumours in 2015, for example, that he had been blackmailed into remaining with the church, something he totally dismissed, saying they were “brilliant”.
And even further back, according to the late Mike Rinder, who was a former senior executive at the church before leaving and turning against it, there were conflicts of interest between Travolta and his career on the big screen. The issues allegedly came in 1994, when Quentin Tarantino was attempting to bring Travolta back from the wilderness for a film that would end up completely transforming his future.
Rinder recalled, “I’ve got a story about this that I’m not sure I should really tell. When Quentin Tarantino approached John Travolta for a role in Pulp Fiction, John asked me to review the script to tell him what I thought, and his role was a heroin-addict assassin, and I said, ‘Oh, John, I don’t think that you should do this’. What great career advice; I should be an agent! Sensibly, he ignored me.”
That’s something of an understatement: Travolta was a revelation in Pulp Fiction, going from forgotten ’70s hero to one of the coolest actors around and received his first Academy Award nomination since the one he picked up for Saturday Night Fever in 1977.
He went on to have another five years of success, until somewhat ironically, he made a movie called Battlefield Earth in 2000, based on another book by Hubbard, which was a box office bomb and was rated as one of the worst mainstream movies in all of cinema history by the critics.
So disastrous it was, in fact, that despite being described by Travolta before filming as ‘better than Star Wars’, it collected a record number of Golden Raspberries and the production company behind it was sued and went bust after fraudulently declaring the budget for the film was much higher than it actually was.
After taking several years out of the movie making business to cope with the death of his wife Kelly Preston, Travolta is now back in the limelight and working on several different projects, including a movie about the assassination of JFK called November 1963, and Black Tides, an action movie with his daughter which is, brilliantly, about a man who goes for a nice boat trip to reconnect with his grandkids but ends up getting attacked by psychotic killer whales.
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