At age 65, John Travolta appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden and ended up teaching the host and a studio audience the dance moves from Pulp Fiction’s most famous scene. English actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his wife, filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson, were on the couch alongside him that evening. The conversation turned to the time they’d dressed as Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace for Halloween, Corden asked Travolta to show them the moves, and Travolta stood up without hesitating.
He started with the Twist, because that was Tarantino’s starting point when they shot the original scene. Tarantino had wanted both actors to do the Twist and nothing else, but Travolta told him it was too limited for the length of the sequence and suggested the novelty dances he’d learned growing up in New Jersey. He went for it, and on Corden’s set, 25 years later, Travolta walked through the full lineup.
The Twist first, then the Swim, where he rolled his arms in a slow breaststroke while shifting his weight foot to foot, then the Jerk, the Hitchhiker with its thumb-over-the-shoulder shimmy that had Corden grinning, the Mashed Potatoes, and finally the Batman, which he nearly forgot before someone on the couch reminded him. Each move built off the last, and by the end, all four of them were on their feet trying to keep up while the audience cheered.
In the 2019 appearance, Travolta wasn’t performing a rehearsed bit or promoting a new project. He was sharing how something people love was actually made, and he seemed pleased to still be asked about it. The segment has pulled 22 million views on YouTube, 134,000 likes, and over 5,500 comments. Those numbers didn’t appear over a single week. The clip keeps resurfacing years after it aired. Picked up by new audiences through social media reposts and YouTube recommendations, shared by people who weren’t watching CBS that night and may not have been old enough to see Pulp Fiction when it came out.
What Made the Pulp Fiction Dance Scene Untouchable
This section has spoilers from Pulp Fiction.
In Pulp Fiction, Travolta plays Vincent Vega. A career criminal working for a Los Angeles gangster named Marsellus Wallace. Marsellus asks Vincent to take his wife, Mia, out for the evening while he’s away on business. Before the date even begins, Vincent’s partner Jules tells him the story of Tony Rocky Horror. A man, Marsellus, allegedly threw off a balcony for giving Mia a foot massage. Vincent takes Mia to Jackrabbit Slim’s. A retro 1950s diner with waiters dressed as James Dean and Buddy Holly and a dance floor where patrons sock-hop to golden oldies. When she insists they enter a twist contest. He goes along with it.
The audience already knows what’s at stake. Because these are 2 people enjoying each other way more than they should be. Vincent will be the one who’ll pay for it if Marsellus decides the evening went too far. That tension runs through every moment of the dance, and it’s what separates the scene from a regular musical number.
The song is Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” The dancing is loose, unpolished, and alive. Tarantino didn’t hand his actors a set of choreographed steps. He gave them the setting, the song, the contest framing, and the emotional stakes. Then let them find the physical language between their characters in real time. As John Travolta explained on Corden’s show, he pushed to fill the sequence with the other dances he’d been doing since he was a kid. And Tarantino agreed.
The camera stays wide for long stretches. Letting the audience watch both actors at once rather than cutting between them. Thurman had never done anything like this on camera and was terrified of it. While Travolta had been dancing on screen for decades. Thurman’s uncertainty reads as Mia’s recklessness, someone pulling a dangerous man onto a dance floor because she feels like it. Travolta’s ease gives Vincent the kind of physical confidence that makes the flirtation feel real instead of performed.
A scene analysis from StudioBinder, a film production education platform, adds a detail that changes how the dance reads. Most viewers assume the scene is a callback to Travolta’s role in Saturday Night Fever. But Tarantino’s actual reference point was a sequence in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 French film Bande à part. Where 3 young characters break into a spontaneous dance inside a Parisian café. The reference wasn’t to John Travolta’s talent. It was Godard’s idea of people dancing for themselves rather than for any audience. Dropped inside a gangster film where that kind of unguarded moment could get someone killed.
Minutes after the contest ends, Mia finds a bag of heroin in Vincent’s coat. Mistakes it for cocaine. And overdoses on his watch. Vincent drives her to his dealer’s house, where they bring her back with an adrenaline needle straight to the chest. Without the dance scene before this, the overdose is just an intense plot. But with it, the audience has already watched two people drop their guard with each other. The cost of that feels specific and earned.
Thirty Years Later, the Dance Floor Is Still Full
Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, and by the time Travolta, Uma Thurman, and Samuel L. Jackson reunited at the 2022 Academy Awards to present Best Actor. The dance scene had been living outside the film for almost 3 decades. Thurman walked on stage in a white silk shirt and black skirt that echoed Mia Wallace’s outfit. And before Jackson could finish his introduction, she and Travolta started doing the twist behind him.
Jackson played it dry. Telling the audience the film was a masterpiece, but that his co-stars seemed to think it was all about a dance contest. The bit received a standing ovation. It wasn’t the first time the moves had shown up in a corporate setting, either. Travolta and Jackson had already filmed a Capital One holiday commercial in 2020. Where Travolta played a version of Santa Claus dancing to “Run, Run Rudolph” using the same Jackrabbit Slim’s choreography.
When the film turned 30 in 2024, Travolta marked the anniversary at a screening during the TCM Classic Film Festival with his daughter, Ella. She told Entertainment Tonight she’d had to wait until she was 18 before her father would let her see the film. When she finally did, she called it “the definition of a perfect movie.”
But most people who grew up with Pulp Fiction didn’t wait nearly that long. By 2025, some of them were putting the dance into their own milestones. Newsweek covered the story of Georgia Reid, a 28-year-old bride from Adelaide Hills, Australia. She recreated the twist contest with her 58-year-old father, David O’Ryan, at her wedding.
Reid told the outlet her father had raised her on Tarantino films and that Pulp Fiction was both of their favorites. They only practiced together twice because they’d each watched the movie so many times they already knew the choreography. She sent him a video of herself running through it at home so they could make sure they were doing the same parts. since the film cuts the song differently from the full track. The TikTok of their dance pulled 3.5 million views.
@georyanmusic Father Daughter Dance – you don’t know the facts until you know the fiction #pulpfiction #fyp #fatherdaughterdance #weddingdance #wedding #foryou @John Travolta ♬ You Never Can Tell From Movie "Pulp Fiction" – Chuck Berry
Reid’s video was one of millions. On TikTok, the #pulpfictiondance hashtag has accumulated millions of posts. Most of them are recreations, couples’ tributes, wedding dances, and Halloween costume videos built around the same 6 or 7 moves from the original scene. The moves are popular because they’re low-effort and slightly goofy. But also simple enough that anyone can pick them up by watching Travolta’s tutorial a few times.
A Career That Keeps Finding the Beat
This kind of afterlife does not come from a single scene. It comes from an actor whose body has always done as much work as his face. Across a career with more turns in it than most people realize.
John Travolta dropped out of high school at 16, toured with the national company of Grease playing Doody. Then made his Broadway debut in Over Here! before moving to Los Angeles. A one-scene role as a fall victim in a 1972 episode of Emergency! led nowhere. But then his first real break came 3 years later with Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter.
Two years after that, Saturday Night Fever changed everything. He played Tony Manero. A paint store clerk from Bay Ridge who comes alive on the disco floor every weekend, the performance earned him his first Academy Award nomination at 24. Travolta told the Ocala StarBanner it was “the blueprint for everything that has happened to me.” Grease followed in 1978. Pairing him with Olivia Newton-John in one of the highest-grossing films of the decade.
Blow Out came in 1981, his second film with Brian De Palma. And drew some of the strongest reviews of his career. But failed at the box office. Staying Alive grossed over $65 million. But critics tore it apart. Two of a Kind flopped. Perfect went nowhere. He turned down American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman during that stretch. Both went to Richard Gere.
By the late 1980s, his biggest recent success was Look Who’s Talking. A comedy with Kirstie Alley that grossed $297 million worldwide and produced 2 sequels. But none of them put him back into the kind of conversation Saturday Night Fever had started. His agent, Mike Simpson, later told Vanity Fair that Travolta was “as cold as they get,” the industry shorthand for an actor nobody wanted to cast.
Then Quentin Tarantino called. Tarantino had been watching Travolta since he was a kid. Listing Welcome Back, Kotter, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Blow Out as formative favorites. He invited Travolta to his apartment in Los Angeles. Which turned out to be the same apartment Travolta had lived in when he first moved to the city. The two spent nearly 24 hours together playing board games based on Travolta’s old roles.
At some point during the evening, Travolta started going through Tarantino’s finances. Advising the young director on how to manage his money. Years later, at the same TCM festival where Travolta screened the film with his daughter, Tarantino explained why the financial advice had meant so much to him. He wanted Vincent Vega to feel like a man who had seen enough of the world to have opinions about it. And watching Travolta calmly walk him through money management revealed exactly that quality. “You had this philosophical viewpoint that I need for that character,” Tarantino told him.
The performance earned Travolta his second Academy Award nomination in 1995. 17 years after his first. He didn’t win either time. But the momentum held. Get Shorty earned him a Golden Globe the following year, Face/Off paired him with Nicolas Cage in a film built entirely around physicality. And Primary Colors brought him a SAG nomination for Best Actor.
The 2000s brought action films and thrillers that critics largely ignored. By 2016, when he took on Robert Shapiro in The People v. O.J. Simpson, he was coming off another stretch where the industry had moved on. That performance earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination and reminded people what he could do with the right material.
His career has always moved in cycles. Dipping and resurfacing when the industry stopped expecting it. Travolta wasn’t performing from a position of dominance in 1994. He was an actor in the middle of a long dry stretch who walked onto a set, pulled from the dances he’d been doing since childhood. He gave people something they’re still copying 30 years later. But through all of it, his family kept him grounded.
What He Carries With Him
John Travolta met Kelly Preston in 1987, right in the middle of those cold years when the industry had stopped calling. She was an actress with her own career by then. Having appeared in more than 60 films and television productions over four decades. She played Tom Cruise’s fiancée in Jerry Maguire. Starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins. And took roles in SpaceCamp, Jack Frost, and a recurring part on the television series Medium. By her own account, she looked up during her screen test for a spy comedy called The Experts and saw Travolta walk into the room with two dogs.
They married in 1991. First at the Hotel de Crillon in Paris and then again in Daytona Beach, Florida. After the first ceremony was deemed invalid under French law. They built a life together in a gated aviation community called Jumbolair. Located outside Ocala. Where residents can taxi their planes directly to their front doors.
The community sits on 550 acres and features the longest private paved runway in the United States. A detail that suited Travolta’s lifelong love of flying. He kept a Boeing 707 on the property for years before donating it in 2017. Preston once told Health magazine that she would be sitting at home doing something normal with the kids when she would hear his plane land and see the lights approaching, followed by his shout of “Honey, I’m home.”
Their first son, Jett, was born in 1992 and had autism and a history of seizures dating back to childhood. Travolta later testified that Jett experienced seizures every 5 to 10 days throughout his life, and the family had been managing his condition for years when tragedy arrived. In January 2009, while they were vacationing in the Bahamas. Jett suffered a seizure and died at 16.
Ella Bleu had been born in 2000, and after Jett’s death, the couple had another son, Benjamin, in November 2010. Then in 2018, Kelly was diagnosed with breast cancer and chose to keep her illness private. She died in July 2020 at the age of 57, surrounded by only close family and friends. Travolta announced her death on Instagram. Writing that she had “fought a courageous fight with the love and support of so many.
Since then, Travolta has raised Ella and Benjamin as a single father. His social media shows a story of a father who is present and devoted. In October 2025, on what would have been Kelly’s 63rd birthday. He shared a song he had recorded and dedicated to her, writing, “I recorded this song for Kelly, and I want to share it with you all.”
Ella, now 25, is building a career in music and acting. She released an EP called Colors of Love dedicated to her mother, and she has spoken publicly about how protective and supportive her father has been as she works her way through the industry that raised him. She will also appear alongside him in Black Tides, an orca survival thriller currently in post-production that casts Travolta as an estranged father trying to reconnect with his daughter. The fictional story mirrors his real-life devotion in a way neither of them could have planned.
Benjamin, 15, is into skiing and parkour, and Travolta regularly shares videos of his adventures, including a mountain-climbing trip they took together in Norway in late 2025. In a Good Morning America profile on his family, Travolta described fatherhood as “a privilege.” In February 2026, he shared a belated family Christmas card on Instagram with the caption “My beautiful babies in my belated Christmas card 2025. Hope all is going well.”
The top comment on the Corden YouTube video, the one with over 5,000 likes and 120 replies, reads “John’s wife and son have both passed away…his heart is broken, but still has the strength to make others happy.” It sits at the top of a 22 million-view dance lesson, and it has been there for years.
When people watch that clip, or learn the moves from a TikTok tutorial, or dress as Vincent and Mia for Halloween, they are responding to an actor who communicates through movement, and the best movement carries feeling.
So What Is Travolta Up to in 2026?
At 72, John Travolta is not slowing down. He has at least 6 films in various stages of production. Most of the genre pictures are being built for international markets rather than domestic theatrical runs. The pace is relentless, even if the projects themselves rarely break through to mainstream attention.
The one with the most credible pedigree is November 1963. A JFK assassination thriller directed by two-time Oscar nominee Roland Joffé. Travolta plays Johnny Roselli, a Chicago Outfit mobster the CIA recruited in the 1960s to help assassinate Fidel Castro. The film draws on firsthand accounts from the family of crime boss Sam Giancana. Whose grandnephew, Nicholas Celozzi, wrote the screenplay. Mandy Patinkin, Dermot Mulroney, and Robert Carlyle round out the cast. The production reconstructed Dealey Plaza at Birds Hill Provincial Park in Manitoba during a July 2025 shoot. No release date has been announced.
Black Tides. The survival thriller featuring Ella mentioned earlier. Pairs Travolta with director Renny Harlin. The film was shot using practical effects and real water work rather than digital composites. And like November 1963, it remains in post-production with no scheduled release.
Then there are the projects that feel more like industry output than creative ambition. Syndicate, a faith-driven action film with Jim Caviezel. Wrapped shooting in 2025 and cast Travolta as an FBI special agent running an undercover informant. Ed, an AI horror thriller that entered production in Atlanta in September 2025, features Travolta alongside Crystal Reed and Chet Hanks in a story about a sentient chauffeur robot that starts killing reckless drivers. Cash Out 3 brought him back to Mississippi in spring 2025 to reprise Mason Goddard. A master thief, he first played in 2024, and the sequel to that film received brutal reviews when it arrived earlier this year.
The project that stands apart from the rest is That’s Amore! A musical romantic comedy written and directed by Nick Vallelonga. Travolta plays Nick Venere, a lifelong bachelor who falls for Katherine Heigl’s anxious singleton. The film features Christopher Walken, Talia Shire, and William Fichtner in supporting roles.
Vallelonga, who won two Oscars for Green Book. Has described the film as a throwback to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. With Travolta recording 7 songs alongside a full orchestra. The project has been in pre-production for years and faced production troubles. But Vallelonga told Variety he wasn’t worried. “It’s a little risky to do a musical,” he said, “but we’ve got Travolta.”
Whether any of these films will resonate the way Pulp Fiction did is beside the point. Travolta has always worked steadily between the peaks. Filling the gaps with whatever came his way, and the current slate suggests nothing has changed.
He keeps showing up, keeps moving, keeps finding the next job before the last one lands. And when someone asks him to teach them the Twist. He gets up and does it like he’s been waiting for the invitation. John Travolta, at 72, still looks like someone who loves what he does, and that’s harder to fake than any dance move.