Even though Quentin Tarantino almost single-handedly revived his career, John Travolta declined the opportunity to reunite with his Pulp Fiction director for a very simple reason.
Not that he was being disrespectful, and how could he have been? After all, Travolta was in the midst of a huge downturn in the early 1990s that had seen his star power and name value plummet, a far cry from the star who exploded onto the scene and conquered the A-list two decades previously.
Headlining Saturday Night Fever and Grease back-to-back within seven months of each other would do wonders for anybody’s career, with the former making Travolta one of the youngest ‘Best Actor’ nominees in Academy Awards history, while the film itself became one of the highest-grossing R-rated releases of all time, popularised disco around the world, and spawned one of the best-selling soundtracks ever.
Grease, meanwhile, seeped into the pop culture consciousness and vacated theatres as the top-earning musical ever made, so it would be impossible for Travolta to maintain that momentum. Fortunately, Tarantino came calling at just the right time, dusting off a performer in danger of becoming a relic and launching a second wind that lasted through to the turn of the millennium.
Travolta pretty much ended his own renaissance when he decided Battlefield Earth was a good idea and something worth investing millions of his own dollars in, but if it wasn’t for Pulp Fiction, then he may never have gotten the chance to hit the self-destruct button in the first place.
He was the only name being floated for the ensemble over which the filmmaker experienced any sort of pushback, but he stuck to his guns and steered Travolta towards another ‘Best Actor’ nod. There was even a two-for-one deal in the offing, with Tarantino presenting his Vincent Vega with a pair of screenplays.
One of them was obviously Pulp Fiction, and the other was a genre-bending thriller indebted to Tarantino’s love of exploitation, following a pair of criminal brothers who get more than they bargained for when their stop-off at a bar in the middle of nowhere takes a turn for the undead.
With Tarantino scripting and playing Richard Gecko under the direction of Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk till Dawn offered an early glimpse of George Clooney’s transcendent charisma when he bucked his clean-cut Dr. Doug Ross image from small screen favourite ER to play a smouldering, suave, and trigger-happy older sibling Seth.
It was Travolta’s for the taking after his interest was gauged, though, apart from the insurmountable fact he wasn’t interested. He and Tarantino discussed both scripts until the early hours of the morning, but only one of them tickled his fancy. Why wasn’t he interested in From Dusk till Dawn? As he matter-of-factly told Vanity Fair, “I’m not a vampire person.”
There’s no changing the mind of an actor who doesn’t want to deal with bloodsucking hordes, but his loss proved to be Clooney’s gain when the film became a deranged cult classic and midnight staple.