John Travolta is finally starting to embrace his baldness, debuting a completely shaved look on Jimmy Kimmel Live this week with his daughter, Ella Bleu.
Jimmy Kimmel Live guest host Lena Waite, who also shaved her head, asked the Grease star, 65, if he thought the infamous New Year’s Eve photo with 19-year-old Ella would go viral.
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“No… it’s a haircut!” Travolta said, shrugging. “The last time I went viral before that, I mispronounced Idina Menzel’s name on the Oscars.”
In the photo, Travolta had a fully shaved head and a scruffy gray beard. The photo earned thousands of comments, including many who suggested Travolta looked much better without hair.
Waite asked Ella if she liked her dad bald.
“I really like it a lot,” Ella said. “It looks great.”
“It’s so much easier… hell yeah,” Travolta said.
Waite said it is nerve-racking going bald, since you never really know how your head will look.
“You’re very lucky,” the Master of None star said. “You look kinda look like how Nicholas Cage looked when he played you on Face/Off.”
Travolta said he got used to being bald after making From Paris With Love, in which he had to shave his hair. He also surprisingly became good friends with rapper Pitbull, who encouraged Travolta to go bald.
“You hanging out with Pitbull is kinda like a TV show,” Waite quipped.
Travolta also talked about his relationship with Mohammad Ali. He said the two would compete to see who was more famous during the height of their popularity.
“It was at a time where arguably we were the two most famous people in the world. And he loved to compete with it. And he used to test it all the time,” Travolta recalled. “We’d walk down the street, he’d say, ‘Let’s see who gets recognized first.’ One time a young person recognized us both and kind of freaked out.”
Travolta said Ali then told the young person, “‘You think you’re dreaming. You think you’re seeing John Travolta and Muhammad Ali together and you’ll go home and you’re gonna say, Was that real or was I dreaming?’”
While Travolta is a cool dad, Ella shared one story of how embarrassing he could be. One time, he had Taylor Lautner‘s family over, and Ella was doing “research” on him before the Twilight star came over. Travolta found out, and could not keep the information to himself.
“The first thing he says to them is, ‘Oh, Ella was just looking you guys up on the internet,’” Ella told Waite. “And I was like, what?”
“A father’s point of view is everyone loves Taylor Lautner, wouldn’t he be flattered that Ella’s looking him up?” Travolta joked.
Travolta and Ella were on JKL to promote their new film The Poison Rose, a thriller that hits theaters on Friday. The film also stars Morgan Freeman, Brendan Fraser and Famke Janssen.
Photo credit: ABC