John Travolta Doesn't Think Much About the #MeToo Movement

On Wednesday, at the Cannes Film Festival, where John Travolta is promoting his new movie, Gotti, the actor did an interview in which he was asked, among other things, for his thoughts on the #MeToo movement and what he sees as its effect on Hollywood. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Travolta replied:

“I don’t know much about it. I try to keep people equal. I’m a citizen of the globe. Division is a dangerous thing.”

THR reported that this comment received massive audience applause.

The Los Angeles Times’ Amy Kaufman elaborated on Twitter that Travolta said he doesn’t think a lot about gender and race because of that whole “citizen of the world” thing. His thoughts on Battlefield Earth and Picasso also gave me pause.

It’s a pretty dumb opinion! How do I feel about it? On the one hand, it’s right to expect that the most famous among us wouldn’t harbor post-racial delusions no matter how cut off from reality, insulated by money, and into Scientology they might be; on the other hand, you asked for it.

But wait, there’s more, the Times also jotted down Travolta’s thoughts, if you could call them that, on protesting, which he said he likes to think of as a “last resort.” OK, here we go:

“Protest is valid. But how do you measure—how do you differentiate the moment where it becomes invalid? It’s an art, almost, to say, ‘OK, let’s protest, but we’ve achieved that here and these particular rights. Now, let’s get smart about how we use that … protest so it doesn’t get into an irrational perspective.’ If we go back to the humanities of being each other’s friends and wanting and caring at a deep level, then we’ll make it. But it’s a dwindling spiral out there.”

I don’t like to think about whatever he said here too much, but “it’s a dwindling spiral out there” seems…correct. There were no follow-up questions.

Finally, on the subject of female directors in Hollywood, Travolta had this to say:

“I don’t really make a lot of difference between the sexes. I don’t really even like it, to be honest. I don’t like trying to make the sexes so different from each other. I find it kind of inhuman sometimes because we’re all in the same boat together.”