From 007 to the godfather of sludge metal: the strange story of John Travolta’s ‘nephew’ auditioning for James Bond
Nepotism can get you pretty far in Hollywood, as far as auditioning for a James Bond movie, apparently. But what happens when that nepotism isn’t really nepotism at all, but something else entirely?
Hollywood is littered with second or even third-generation stars with a familiar surname, but Rikki Lee Travolta isn’t one that comes to mind. As you can guess, he traded on his connections to the Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction icon and found himself in the room auditioning for Casino Royale.
The process to find Pierce Brosnan’s replacement stretched far and wide before settling on Daniel Craig, including a locksmith who spent a fortune trying to push themselves into contention. That didn’t work, obviously, but Travolta was keen to clarify that he may not have been testing for the leading role at all.
“It was not, to my belief, for James Bond,” he explained. “Unless the producers were doing their tests with a fake name for the project. Since that is not unheard of, of course, there is always that chance. But I was told it was a different role entirely. The dialogue was very close to a traditional James Bond scene.”
That was that, then, or so you’d think. However, in his memoir, Unbecoming Travolta, he shared that he’d suffered a nervous breakdown, and when he was hospitalised, he discovered that he wasn’t related to John Travolta at all. His name was actually Gregory Michael Bieze, son of Gerald Bieze, who went under the alias of Michael Salvatore Travolta.
The book detailed his personal battles with psychological and physical trauma, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, and severe anxiety, citing ‘Rikki Lee Travolta’ as an alternate personality that developed as a result. And yet, things became even murkier from there.
Travolta/Bieze would subsequently distance himself from his own memoir, with his team suggesting that he’d been “targeted by fake biographical works,” noting that “the author and his legal team have demanded that the libellous book Unbecoming Travolta be pulled from the market due to its gross inaccuracies and profoundly damaging content,” which hardly makes things much clearer.
This would be the same Rikki Lee Travolta who said in an interview with Stephanie Greer, “After being diagnosed with mental illness as an adult, I started the long process of putting my life back together and pointing my ship in the direction of the healthiest life possible,” so, with the greatest of respect, there’s been some mixed messaging.
What we do know is that Travolta has dubbed himself as ‘The Godfather of Sludge Metal’ for “bringing Crowbar into the recording industry,” according to him, he’s friends with former Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler, and he counts actor, filmmaker, multimedia producer, podcast host, author, marketing and branding expert, and product spokesperson among his many areas of expertise. He definitely failed his James Bond audition, too, which might be the least interesting thing about him.
