John Travolta Wanted His Hairspray Appearance To Have One Key Difference From Divine's

When you first saw John Travolta as Edna Turnblad in the 2007 musical movie "Hairspray," did you recognize him? It's okay if you didn't — in fact, that's exactly what the actor was going for. Travolta wanted Edna to feel like a woman, rather than a man in drag. Casting a man in this role was a nod to the source material, John Waters' 1988 film of the same name, in which the drag queen Divine plays Edna. Rather than lean into the drag elements of the original film, Travolta put his own twist on the part.

"I tried to make it so you never really knew it was me, that you thought it was some sort of eccentric overweight woman," the "Grease" star explained to Access Online. "Divine always had kind of the wink that it was a man playing a woman, but I tried not to have the wink."

Travolta approached his performance as a woman less in the tradition of drag and closer to the ancient theatrical practice of men playing women, "like Shakespeare, Greek theater, [or] Kabuki," he explained in a 2007 interview. He attempted to gear his performance and appearance towards realistic feminine qualities rather than exaggerated ones.

It was important to Travolta that the audience only saw Edna, not Travolta playing a woman. For some of his co-stars and friends, he was totally successful, while others saw right through the costume and the performance.

Before his casting in "Hairspray" was announced, Travolta took pleasure in showing his screen tests to his friends and tricking them into thinking they were really watching some unknown actress. The actor even had trouble recognizing himself when he first came onscreen in his Edna costume.

"I didn't see me in it," he explained (via Collider), "and I tested it on other people [...] I let them watch for five minutes, about 15 minutes of film, and I said, 'What do you think of her?' They said, 'She's fun, she's lovely, she's kind of cute,' I said, 'Good, that's me.'"

His co-star Queen Latifah, who plays Motormouth Maybelle, felt like Edna Turnblad was a real person even though she knew it was Travolta under all the makeup and costume.

"I mean, he was Edna Turnblad," she explained to Artisan News "I got used to seeing him as this girl, this big old woman, y'know what I mean, with this curvaceous body that really just moved — and he was able to move like it was his. It was cool."

Christopher Walken, who plays Edna's husband Wilbur, was not so easily fooled by Travolta's acting. "I never looked at him like Edna, it was always John," he admitted. Despite being unenchanted by Travolta's transformation, the actor still had no trouble playing his romantic interest. "I like John a lot and I got along really well with him," Walken explained, "so I think that just carried over into Wilbur and Edna." That's nice and all, but if he's trying to say that there wasn't at least one moment during "You're Timeless to Me" that he wasn't totally transfixed and convinced by Edna, forgive me if I simply don't believe it.

Walken might not have fallen for Edna, but Travolta put a lot of effort into making sure that the character felt realistic onscreen. He spent five hours a day getting into hair and makeup, per Access Online, and put a lot of thought into her costuming.

"[T]hey were determined to make her look like a refrigerator," the actor told Collider. "I said, 'Uh Uh, it's not going to work, I won't do it.' I said, 'I want her to look like a woman.' I said, 'Imagine Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Anita Ekbert gone-to-flesh. That's what I want.' And I won that, kept sending the fat suit back, and back and back."

But it wasn't just appearances that Travolta wanted to transform. He also wanted Edna to sound like someone else, which is why he advocated for her to have a Baltimore accent. 

"[A Baltimore accent is] naturally effete, for men and women," he explained. "So when I won that war, that argument, I knew that I was home free. But the accent was very important to me, because I think they were expecting me to do more of a New York thing and I knew that would make it more masculine and more identifiable to John Travolta, and I didn't want that."

The actor even added one final layer of eccentricity to give Edna more dimension and to guide her physical mannerisms. "It's not easy, but part of my character interpretation is I pretended that she thought she was 100 pounds," Travolta revealed. "I played opposite the weight, like a flying elephant or something."

The thought and care that Travolta put into becoming Edna come through loud and clear onscreen. The actor undoubtedly reshaped the role from Divine's original interpretation, but has he truly departed from Edna's drag origins? Maybe not.