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
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