The best actor in modern Hollywood, according to John Travolta: “My favourite”
It must be a real rollercoaster ride being John Travolta. Most actors have a reasonably linear career trajectory; they start off small and then they get big. Or they start off big and then fall by the wayside. Either way, it’s fairly clear whether they’re doing well or not. But this is not the case for Travolta. Not at all. At various points in his 50-year career, you could honestly guess whether he’s currently successful or not and get it completely wrong.
Of course, in the 1970s, he was a true megastar in every sense of the word. The worldwide hit movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease had turned the New Jersey native into possibly the most in-demand actor in Hollywood. The old adage of women wanting him and men wanting to be him certainly rang true.
But then, after a much-vaunted turn in the 1981 Brian De Palma thriller Blow Out, things started to go downhill pretty quickly. For almost ten years, Travolta missed out on big roles to the new flavours of the month like Tom Hanks, and his stock had never been lower. Then, at the start of the ’90s, he landed a role in the baby-speaks comedy Look Who’s Talking, and things very briefly looked up. But only briefly.
That changed, of course, when Quentin Tarantino came knocking. When casting for Pulp Fiction in 1994, Tarantino decided that Travolta was the perfect man to play ageing hitman Vincent Vega, and it proved to be a masterstroke. The director was a fan of his earlier work, including Blow Out and took a chance. That resulted in Travolta earning himself an Oscar nomination.
His brilliant performance alongside Samuel L Jackson once again made him a household name, and he wisely followed it up with a couple of fantastic roles in the likes of Face Off and Primary Colors. Everything was rosy, surely that was it; he was now an A-lister again, right?
Not so fast, as this is Travolta we’re talking about. His ill-advised dalliance with Scientology swiftly resulted in 2000’s Battlefield Earth, one of the most disastrous and poorly-reviewed movies of all time. It was enough to send the actor’s stock plummeting once more. From there on, he had to work hard to land decent parts, although his undoubted ability as an actor won out in the end. He put in a fine shift in the ‘old men get on motorbikes and learn some stuff’ comedy Wild Hogs and then voiced the cartoon dog in Disney’s surprise smash Bolt alongside Miley Cyrus.
In all truth, it was still a far cry from Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever, but Travolta has come through it all mostly unscathed and, in his defence, it was personal tragedy that caused him to take a step back from making films for some time in 2020 when sadly his wife Kelly Preston passed away.
Aside from being a fully qualified commercial pilot, Travolta keeps himself busy by being quite active on Instagram, and it was on the social media platform that he revealed the identity of one of his favourite actors, namely Sam Rockwell.
Moon star Rockwell had at the time just finished a role in Fosse/Verson, a one-season TV show based on the story of legendary director and choreographer Bob Fosse and dancer Gwen Verdon. Rockwell starred alongside Michelle Williams in the series, earning himself an award at the 26th Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Travolta was quick to congratulate him, posting: “Big congrats to my favourite actor Sam Rockwell on winning best actor for Fosse/Verdon. Incredibly well deserved!”
As for Travolta, it seems the rollercoaster continues. His 2023 film Mob Land went basically unnoticed, and this year, it was reported that his movie High Rollers had performed spectacularly badly at the box office, earning just hundreds in ticket sales.
This is John Travolta we’re talking about, though, and we wouldn’t write him off just yet.
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