John Travolta paces a Georgetown hotel room on a mid-August morning, imitating the pronounced physicality of a few of his more recent characters. He highlights his versatility by switching from the long strides of Robert Shapiro, an attorney in the FX miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, to the hesitant baby steps of Edna Turnblad, the protagonist’s anxious mother in the movie musical Hairspray. Satisfied with the demonstration, he eventually returns to the couch where he has been sipping an iced tea, specially requested with a slice of lemon.

Travolta points out that he is bald, a beauty decision inspired in part by the rapper Pitbull, whose music video the veteran actor, 65, recently appeared in – a random fact he volunteers to back his claim that he’s in the “no regrets” stage of his career. That’s not to suggest he’s playing it safe, as that has never been his forte. He’s just taking on the projects he’s always wanted to take on, marketability be damned.

Playing a racecar driver had long been on Travolta’s bucket list, he says, so when the opportunity arose with February’s Trading Paint, also starring Shania Twain, he seized it. Similar reasoning might have led him to accept the title role in last year’s crime drama Gotti, which stewed in development for nearly a decade and ultimately wound up with a zero-per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 55 reviews.

Regardless of how his films have been received as of late, the passion with which Travolta takes on each role is palpable. The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael once praised his performance in Saturday Night Fever by writing that he “isn’t just a good actor, he’s a generous-hearted actor”, words he still holds close to his heart decades later. This generosity has most recently been granted to the lead character of The Fanatic, a movie about an avid fan-turned-stalker – a “stan” in the modern parlance – named Moose.

“I don’t mind watching people that have made a career out of being themselves, that’s just not my thing,” Travolta says of his varied roles. “It’s not even a fear of typecasting, it’s a fear of getting bored. If you don’t have that level of pleasure in your performance, people pick up on it. ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to be there, he’s phoning it in,’ whatever. I really love embracing the pleasure of it.”

There’s a lot to unpack with The Fanatic, beginning with the fact that it was directed by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, whom Travolta says is “a terrific actor, too, by the way”. The rap-rock band once famously incurred the wrath of Eminem, who in 2000 released the chart-topping track “Stan”, written from the perspective of an obsessed fan, which led to the creation of the slang term. The accompanying music video’s stan appears in the form of teen idol Devon Sawa, who also plays Hunter Dunbar, the action star Travolta’s character is obsessed with in, yup, The Fanatic.

Durst had apparently written the role of Moose with Travolta in mind, loosely basing the character off a real person who the actor says was on the disability spectrum to some degree. Travolta purposefully leaned into that characterisation as a way to “justify for the audience why he’s crossing the line”. It might be more accurate to say that Moose, a mistreated Hollywood street performer, leaps past the line – after Hunter abruptly ends a meet-and-greet before Moose has the chance to talk to his hero, Moose uses a paparazzo friend’s connections to start stalking Hunter, who eventually winds up tied to his own bed.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk