BATTLEFIELD EARTH: John Travolta's Greatest Challenge

By: Edward Gross
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2000

Over the course of his nearly 30-year career, John Travolta has played a wide-ranging series of characters, from a moronic student (TV's WELCOME BACK, KOTTER) to a disco king (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER), criminal with dreams of stardom (GET SHORTY), and a couple of genuine villains (BROKEN ARROW, FACE/OFF). None of these roles, however, seem to have afforded the actor quite the same challenge as his portrayal of Turl, the seven-foot alien, in the forthcoming BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

'Challenge besides the obvious four-hour makeup and apparatus I had to be put on every day?' he muses. 'To be honest, I liked so well the way that Corey Mandel wrote the part. I felt he really captured the character from the book. He used a lot of dialogue from the book, which I always prefer. I always think that if you go back to the base of the writer, you'll get the best dialogue.

'I couldn't wait to play Turl, because I liked the way he was written,' Travolta continues. 'But I would probably have to say that the toughest part was getting in and out of the junk every day. I'll tell you a funny story regarding that. Forest Whitaker had the same apparatus, which was an extended head that goes a little over a foot high and leans back to show some skull. Then there are face applications, like eyebrows and the Fu Manchu-like beard-which is a time-consuming process to blend it in to our own skin. On a good day it took us three hours, and on a not-so-good day, meaning that I had to take breaks to go to the bathroom or eat, it was about four.'


The headpiece, he explains was not removable, and the prosthetic was attached in such a way that he couldn't get any extra air to cool off while he was in it. 'For three weeks,' he explains, 'I was suffering quite a bit where it was digging into my head a little bit, and I couldn't get air. One day I'm sitting on the set, and Forest, who had the identical head apparatus as I do, is sitting there with it removed. I looked at him and said, 'What the hell....? How did it happen? What did you do?' His makeup and hair people, over the weekend, figured out a way of cutting it off and putting a clamp on it so that between takes he could take it off. I looked at my makeup and hair people and said, 'What's going on here? Why does he have it removable and I don't? I would love to be able to remove this between takes.' Needless to say, they felt embarrassed. They pow-wowed with his people and five days later I had the same set-up.

'Over the next five weeks of shooting I had a removable head, which was so thrilling,' he laughs. 'I guess I just felt so much better about everything. Life was different from then on during the shooting. So if I had to pick what was the most difficult, that would be it -- but only for about three weeks.'