Kelly Preston’s Infamous Sex Scene With Tom Cruise Caught John Travolta by Surprise: ‘You Don’t Even Know What Awkward Is’

John Travolta has been back on the interview circuit to discuss his latest movie, The Fanatic, and his latest chat brought up an “awkward” moment in his marriage to Kelly Preston. Travolta and Preston, now married 28 years, were only a few years into their relationship when the Tom Cruise-starring movie Jerry McGuire premiered back in 1996. Preston also starred in the film and infamous;y had a sex scene with Cruise in the movie. While it typically wouldn’t be a big deal, Travolta has now revealed that he was blindsided by the scene and did not know it was in the movie until he saw it.

“You don’t even know what awkward is…until you sit in the screening of Jerry Maguire and you don’t know that (sex) scene is coming up and your wife is with Tom Cruise in the middle of something, that is astonishing,” Travolta told James Corden during an interview on The Late Late Show Thursday (via PEOPLE). “That’s awkward. I had no idea.”

Corden then mentioned one moment in the scene that drew extra ire from Travolta. At one point, Preston (in-character, of course) tells Cruise’s titular character to “Never ever stop f—ing” her.

In regards to that moment in particular, Travolta said, “That was rough.”

While Travolta dipped into his past for this particular excerpt, he seems to also be focused on his future. He’s been in a bit of a career upswing since he starred as lawyer Robert Shapiro in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. While the roles he’s landed in movies like The Fanatic and 2018’s Gotti haven’t earned widespread acclaim, they have caught viewers’ attention and seen Travolta take on a bit of a challenge.

“The successful action for me has always been going outside what you would expect from me. That’s where my comfort zone is; I’m almost less comfortable playing something closer to myself, only because I get a little bored with that,” Travolta told /Film in August. “So if I see and Edna Turnblad [from Hairspray] or Robert Shapiro or Vincent Vega [from Pulp Fiction], I feel like I have something to do. I guess I need to have something to do as an actor. I don’t want to just show up and be whatever that means; I want to show up and perform for you. And in order to do that, I need to have things to do.

“It gives me joy. The more I can disappear, the more joy I get personally. I don’t go to myself for stability; I go to characters for stability. But growing up in a theatrical family, I don’t know if that’s that unusual. Mom was reading us plays to go to bed, and performance was a normal thing—how well you could imitate someone or how well you could do a character or how well you could make us believe you. My mother had a book that said “Acting is believing,” and building a character was part of our orientation to show business, not so much ‘Go out there because you’re so cute or special.’ None of that worked for us. It was ‘How good are you at it?’ That’s what mattered to our family.”

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