In a recent interview with Variety, John Travolta spoke a bit about how, essentially, his characters are better known for themselves rather than for the way he played them. Does that make sense? He doesn’t carry a specific John Travolta style from character to character, basically. Here, he explained it a bit further with this example from filming Face/Off:

“Nic is very stylized in his personality, there’s a voice and a cadence and a walk that’s easy to hold onto, which I could imitate very easily,” he remembers. But Cage had a steeper hill to climb. “Nic said, ‘I can’t find you in any of these movies, I don’t know who you are. There’s just all these characters,'” Travolta says.

“Eventually he said, ‘Tell me if I’m on to something, but I took a little bit of you in Phenomenon, and a little bit of Look Who’s Talking, and I think that’s basically who you are.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty close. That’s accurate enough.’ But it was much easier for me than it was for him.”

“Hah. That’s close. Accurate enough. Though, I am pretty much a mystery, even to myself, due to having to hide significant portions of myself from everyone around me in order to remain consistent with the teachings of a religion that uses intimidation and blackmail to keep its practitioners in line, hah, who am I?” John, I get what you’re saying — and don’t we all like to think of ourselves as inimitable? — so I hate to do this, but I do have a BUNCH of people who can offer evidence to the contrary:

🙁 Sorry, buddy.