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Canwest News Service
John Travolta and his family are still feeling the pain of loss.
It's been more than a year since his 16-year-old son, Jett, died during a family vacation in the Bahamas, and the 55-year-old actor, wife Kelly Preston and daughter Ella continue to deal with the aftermath one day at a time.
"It's been a rough year," Travolta admits to reporters during a news conference in New York to support his sizzling new thriller, From Paris With Love. "I'm not going to say it's not been."
It has also been a year without closure: Travolta is meeting the media on the same morning that Bahamian authorities have announced the date for a retrial of two actors accused of conspiring to extort money from him following Jett's death. Court proceedings will begin Sept. 6.
Travolta is stoic as he talks about coping with tragedy.
"We've been working very hard every day at healing, and we still are. But it's working. We've worked with our church and worked with each other and our friends and family. It's a tough one and it's going to be. But at least we have help and it's working. Thanks for asking."
The actor has always been a loyal foot soldier on behalf of the industry that made him a superstar. He's not yet ready to go back before the cameras — "I'm still taking some time off," he says with a smile–but he was ready and willing to promote From Paris With Love, which opened yesterday, and to discuss his startling performance as a trigger-happy U.S. government agent who breaks every rule in the book to avert a terrorist attack in the French city.
The personal loss hasn't silenced Travolta's humanitarian side either. He's talking to the media only days after he flew his Boeing 707 jetliner on a mission to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
"I had the privilege to fly my Boeing down because it was sitting there empty and I felt a duty and responsibility to fill it with doctors and supplies, food and medicines," says the experienced pilot. Travolta transported seven tons of supplies into Haiti and was able to keep his promise to members of his medical team that the supplies would not be dispersed but stay with them.
"Yesterday and today, I got full reports that the supplies did stay with them … and it was all fresh, all very user-friendly … so it's a satisfying feeling to know not just that you send things but that there was an end product that was successful."
There's a marked contrast between this low-key, soft-spoken celebrity and his lethal, foul-mouthed rogue agent Charlie Wax in From Paris With Love. Charlie is first glimpsed brawling with French customs officials — and initially he's unrecognizable as John Travolta. Totally bald, with a Fu Manchu moustache
and beard, scruffy leather jacket, thick hoop earring, thickening waist line, clanking pectoral cross, manic gleam in his eyes, plus hefty portions of swagger, attitude and smouldering violence — this is the sort of guy you would cross the street to avoid.
Travolta had a ball playing him, but the assignment was exhausting. In fact, there were times when he wondered openly to director Pierre Morel– the French filmmaker responsible for last year's suspense thriller Taken– whether he could pull it off.
"The whole thing was challenging. I said: 'Do you really want me to do these stunts? I mean, I'm going upside down on a pole and shooting with two guns and rolling down buildings and jumping off. I'm an old man. And they said — so what?'
"The oddest thing was that there was such confidence that I could do it that I decided — hell, I'm going to live up to their expectations. And I went and did it, and am really proud that I attacked it in that fullbodied way. It really paid off because I've never done this much action in a movie. Even though I've been in two John Woo movies, this is the most running and jumping and fighting and slipping — and the body's still able to do it!"
Within hours of arriving in Paris, Charlie Wax creates mayhem in a Chinese restaurant, where he complains about the quality of his egg fu yung, and minutes later mows down a mob of terrorists with illegal weaponry, capping it all off by shooting holes in the restaurant ceiling and releasing a cascade of cocaine. The horrified witness to this carnage is a young, ambitious U.S. Embassy aide, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who
has been assigned to partner with this happy sociopath in his violent spree through the Paris underworld.
The result is a blood-spattered variation on the buddy movie, and Travolta says he couldn't have had a better co-star. "Jonathan is just this amazingly talented, gorgeous guy who can do anything."
But it seems Travolta is also determined to prove he can do anything. He's joked in the past that he sustains his career by reinventing himself every few years — the adolescent charm of Welcome Back Kotter, Saturday Night Fever and Grease; his astonishing comeback as a cement-brained hit man in Pulp Fiction; his ventures into philosophical whimsy ( Michael, Phenomenon), into full-scale villainy ( Broken Arrow, Face-Off) and drag ( Hairspray); and now the infernal, bazooka-wielding Charlie Wax.
So yes, with From Paris With Love, Travolta figures he's delivering another reinvention.
"I would have to say that it might be," he laughs. "Because it's pretty extreme, and I don't think anyone's seen me quite this way." He decided that as long as he was allowed to play the character in "the fullbodied way" in which he was written, he could deliver "something entertaining and effective."
Charlie may have many of the trappings of a villain, but Travolta points out that he's different from the bad guys he portrayed in Pulp Fiction and last year's The Taking of Pelham 123.
"I could define it in three different ways. The villain in Pulp Fiction is misguided. The villain in Pelham 123 is just … criminal. And the villain in this is not really a villain. He's a good guy who has unorthodox methods. He is a rogue, so even though he does things we do not agree with, he solves the problem and is so good at what he does that he gets away with being a little naughty. You can take that liberty when you're that good."
Travolta's sense of humour doesn't desert him when discussing the movie, but there's a tinge of sadness when he talks about what he remembers as his personal highlight filming in Paris in late 2008. It's a family memory, having to do with coming back to the hotel late after a long day of shooting and taking his daughter and the son he would tragically lose out for a midnight pizza and cocoa.
"At 2 a.m., we're sitting at the plaza having hot cocoa. They thought this was a whole universe of lifestyle. So that was one of my highlights — the kids in the middle of the night in Paris."
