(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 3 December 2025 22:30, UK
Most actors would kill to have a filmography that looks like John Travolta’s rejects list.
The Battlefield Earth star has been spectacularly selective over the course of his career, but still managed to turn down Days of Heaven and accept Phenomenon. Every star has regrets, whether it’s Burt Reynolds recognising that he probably should’ve taken the Han Solo gig or Will Smith realising too late that The Matrix was going to be better than Wild, Wild West, but Travolta has more reasons than most to question his own track record.
Take, for example, his decision not to make An Officer and a Gentleman after deciding not to make American Gigolo and Days of Heaven. Richard Gere owes his entire career to Travolta’s lack of sound judgment, and while those films are hard to imagine with anyone else, it’s difficult to argue that the actor did himself any favours by passing on them.
Perhaps he could have avoided his career slump in the 1980s if he’d fully embraced the smouldering sexpot persona. Instead, he opted for a Saturday Night Fever sequel and an eye-poppingly terrible drama about aerobics with Jamie Lee Curtis called Perfect that commits the cardinal sin of being campy without intending it.
Although Travolta could write a book about all the movies he’s turned down, he has chosen to limit his reflection to three films in particular. In a 2008 interview with Huff Post, he revealed that, out of everything in his past, he most regrets passing on Chicago, An Officer and a Gentleman, and The Green Mile.
“I wasn’t all that into the stage show,” he said in reference to Chicago, “It was a lot of women who hated men, and I like women who like men”.
He was offered the role of Billy Flynn, a high-flying lawyer who specialises in getting women exonerated for murdering their husbands. As usual, it was Gere who took the part after Travolta turned it down, and he won a Golden Globe Award for his efforts. The film itself took home no fewer than six Oscars, which saw Travolta admit that, while the stage show had struck him as a bit vicious, the movie had more heart.
As for An Officer and a Gentleman and The Green Mile, the Grease star was even clearer, saying, “I probably should have said yes”. The part for the latter film went to Tom Hanks, who had recently won an Oscar for playing another role the former had passed on, Forrest Gump. It’s tricky to imagine Travolta in either part because Tom Hanks is always Tom Hanks: measured, folksy, and unfailingly dedicated to goodness.
To his credit, Travolta is a good sport about the whole thing, viewing the what-ifs as water under the bridge. “I gave Richard Gere and Tom Hanks a career,” he reasoned, “What you turn down can be a gift to someone else. There is enough to go around”.
Such generosity is rare in Hollywood and is especially admirable considering that Hanks became a bigger star than Travolta in the end, but luckily, when Quentin Tarantino called about Pulp Fiction, the actor was in an unusually receptive frame of mind.
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