The movie that convinced Quentin Tarantino to cast John Travolta in ‘Pulp Fiction’
The acting career of John Travolta was at heady heights in the 1970s after he starred in some seriously significant movies such as Carrie, Saturday Night Fever and Grease, establishing himself as a cinematic force to be reckoned with. However, during the following decade, Travolta’s ascent ground to a halting stop.
He featured in the poorly received Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive, a few romantic comedies and Look Who’s Talking. What had looked so promising just ten years prior was now in tatters. Queue Quentin Tarantino, who’d been looking for actors for his second feature, Pulp Fiction, a film in which Travolta eventually starred as Vincent Vega.
On the Joe Rogen Experience podcast, Tarantino once admitted: “The only thing he’d done that had made any noise in a long time was those Look Who’s Talking movies.” He then went on to explain how he decided to give Travolta his comeback role after a slightly arduous process.
“So one of the things when you get a deal with Tristar, you write down everybody you can think of who would be more or less right for the character,” Tarantino said. “And you write down everybody, and if they sign off on it, you can cast any of those people that you want.”
The director thought it best to write a “shitload” of names even if they weren’t actually being considered to play a given character. “I just have this talent pool to choose from,” he said. “I wrote down people in the wildest stretch of the imagination could be okay for the role if it all worked out.”
When Tristar came back to sign off Tarantino’s casting suggestions, they asked him to remove Travolta from the list of names. “This was before I actually wanted John Travolta; I’d written the part for Michael Madsen,” Tarantino admitted. “It was his role.” However, Madsen accepted a role in Wyatt Earp, so he was not available.
Fortunately, the Pulp Fiction deal moved from Tristar to Miramax, so Travolta was suddenly back on the prospective table. Tarantino had been considering the actor for the part of Lance, the drug dealer, played by Eric Stoltz. He continued: “I have lunch with John, and he’s a really great guy, and I start thinking, ‘Well, you know, he could be a real legitimate replacement for Michael Madsen as Vincent’.”
However, several figures in the industry were surprised at Tarantino’s desire to cast Travolta, including Harvey Keitel, who said that he only did “home-to-video” and that “baby talk” stuff. Tarantino could have anyone, even Daniel Day-Lewis, Keitel had suggested.
“It’s one thing to actually push someone aside who’s not hot, but it’s another to push someone who’s hot aside,” Tarantino went on. “The rest of the industry was telling me I was crazy.” However, all it took was for Tarantino to show the Miramax producers Travolta’s work in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out for him to finally get the job.
Tarantino explained that if they didn’t think it was a “great performance” in Blowout, then maybe he shouldn’t have been making the film with them in the first place. Of course, Travolta got the role, made his big comeback in the film industry and delivered one of his greatest-ever performances.
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