John Travolta: Dude looks like a lady

Hollywood — After singing and dancing his way into the hearts of teenage girls everywhere in 1978’s Grease, John Travolta didn’t think he could do another musical.

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Travolta rejected offers to star in A Chorus Line, Chicago and Phantom of the Opera, figuring nothing could top playing Grease’s lovable bad boy, Danny Zuko. (He danced in 1983’s Staying Alive and 1994’s Pulp Fiction, but those weren’t musicals.) Grease’s elevation from box office hit to cinema classic only reinforced his decision.

So when producers asked the A-list star to tackle the role of plus-size Baltimore housewife Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, his first inclination was to turn them down. But something inside gnawed at him.

Hairspray would be a filmed version of the hit Broadway musical based on John Waters’ 1988 cult-classic film. It wasn’t a decision he took lightly. Travolta mulled the offer for 14 months before he signed.

"Finally, after many discussions and meetings, and the vision came to be, I said yes for all the right reasons," recalls the 53-year-old actor.

Musicals are iffy genres in Hollywood. And Travolta, whose career has hit several peaks and valleys over the years, didn’t want to make another misstep.

He arrived on the project with specific ideas about how he wanted to portray his character. Edna had been played by a burly man in drag — most notably by the transvestite actor Divine in Waters’ movie and by Harvey Fierstein on Broadway. Part of the comedy of the character lay in the fact that she was played by a man, with a man’s voice and demeanor, a fact that went overlooked by the other performers.

"I wanted to play her as a woman, not a man playing a woman," Travolta says of Edna.

He insisted that his "fat suit" be given curves, and that Edna not look like "a refrigerator."

"I said she just has to be pleasant to look at," he recalls. "I wanted a Delta Burke gone to flesh. I wanted the obvious to be appealing."

For his role, Travolta endured three hours of makeup everyday, but he says it was well worth the fuss. Edna is also the only character in the movie who speaks with a distinct Baltimore accent.

"The accent was very important to me," he says. "It’s naturally effete. They were expecting me to do more of a New York [accent] but I knew that it would make it more masculine and more identifiable to John Travolta, and I didn’t want that."

Director Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House, The Pacifier) acquiesced to those and other suggestions from Travolta. He also assured the actor that he would do everything in his power to keep the musical "super real" and "as authentic as possible." Weeks before the movie’s release, he was cautiously optimistic that he succeeded.

Shankman says his favorite Hairspray scene comes right before Travolta and 18-year-old newcomer Nikki Blonsky (playing Edna’s daughter, Tracy) sing "Welcome to the Sixties," where Edna leaves her row house after several years of self-imposed exile to discover a world that is more accepting of people who are "different."

John Travolta (center) as the full figured Edna Turnblad in the remake of the 1988 cult film Hairspray — www.outnow.com

"She doesn’t want to go outside, and you see all that hurt and fear in [Travolta’s] eyes," Shankman recalls. "That’s the person we talked about from the very beginning. I was like, ’There’s the lyric."’

James Marsden, who plays the host of a local TV dance show, says it was scary how deeply Travolta immersed himself into his character.

"It was frightening at first," the X-Men actor recalls. "I wasn’t scared, but when he came out [of his trailer] that first day my brain didn’t know how to process it, because I immediately summoned images of him as Danny Zuko and his characters in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction.

"It wasn’t John Travolta in drag," he continues, "it was like he was Edna Turnblad. He just became this person. It was really pretty impressive and tremendously courageous the way he plays the character."

Brittany Snow, who plays the snooty rival of Turnblad’s daughter, says Travolta seemed to relish dressing up as a woman.

"He was shaking his butt," she recalls, laughing. "He was like, ’Look at what I can do with this new booty."’

Travolta admits that dressing up and playing a female character gave him a new appreciation for the opposite sex. "You gals really have got the power over [men] in a lot of different areas," he says, flashing a broad smile. "People were flirting with me, even with [me carrying] all that weight. And I liked it!"

Travolta remarks that cast and crew members couldn’t help wanting to squeeze and pinch him in the fat suit — and he admits that he encouraged them.

"I didn’t really care that I was this object of lust," he says. "I guess if I’d been born a woman, I might have been a slut."

Travolta says he relied on his "library of memories" of women in his life to create the feminine mystique of Edna Turnblad. His mother served as a starting point, he says. As a child growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Travolta saw his mom in similar styles to those worn by the characters in Hairspray.

"There was a lot more accoutrement in those days," he says, referring to the girdles, stockings and other undergarments worn by women 45 years ago.

"I remember [my mother] being exhausted after getting ready for a special event and now I know exactly why," he says, laughing.

Set in segregated Baltimore in 1962, Hairspray humorously delves into the social and political attitudes of the day and the winds of change brought on by progressive youngsters. Edna’s precocious daughter, Tracy, leads a grass-roots movement to integrate the races on the local TV dance show. She encounters resistance from the station’s management, but Tracy is undeterred.

Edna, though, is afraid of change. Overweight, she has locked herself away in her home for more than a decade despite the adoration of her husband, Wilbur (Christopher Walken). While Edna advises Tracy to be cautious about her ambitions, Wilbur encourages her to "think big and be big."

Oscar nominees Michelle Pfeiffer and Queen Latifah co-star along with Amanda Bynes, Zac Efron and Elijah Kelley.

Travolta, who usually avoids controversial questions, says he likes Hairspray’s subtle political overtones.

"Progress has been made but not enough," he says of integration in American society. "There are still issues here and we still have to pay attention, yet this [movie] addresses it in a lighthearted way."

Will Hairspray signal more musicals for Travolta?

"Only the sequel," he says with a laugh.

— Nielsen Entertainment News Wire


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John Travolta: Dude looks like a lady