Was it easy to forget that John was underneath all that makeup and costume?

Yeah, it was.  It was frightening at first.  I wasn’t scared but when he came out it was my brain didn’t know how to process it because I immediately summoned up images of him as Danny Zucko and his character in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction and now he’s a woman, but more remarkable than just the physical transformation was this internal transformation that happened.  When he came out for the 1^st time he was…it was during a table read through and he came out and everybody saw him and he was a woman.  He was pretending to be a woman. It wasn’t John Travolta in drag, it was like he was Edna Turnblad and he just became this person. It was really pretty impressive and tremendously courageous and the conviction with which he plays the character.  I just take my hat off to him and everybody really goes for it in this movie, but yeah, it was strange at first because you can see his eyes and you go those are John’s eyes but I don’t see anything else.  Then they’d yell cut and he’d go how was that take and his voice would come back but it was just strange.

He wasn’t ever out of costume so when he was voicing Edna there was never like John just being John voicing Edna?  He was always in character?

Well, no.  At the read through—it was the most bizarre read through—because normally at a read through everybody sits around a table people from New Line, the producers, the cast, the singers, the dancers, everybody and you read through the script for the entire movie, well, this every 3 minutes we were getting up, grabbing a live microphone and singing live while the dancers performed the numbers in the background.  So, at the read through John was not—oh there were 2 read throughs—the first one was just for the cast and that’s where John came out in his makeup and he sat there for the read-through and essentially he was basically Edna for the whole read-through, and then the next day he was just John.  But on-set he would come out—if was in the prosthetics he was Edna, he was not John.  But after some of the dancing that was so labor intensive moving around in that suit and everything, the lights were so hot that he would stop and it would be almost impossible for him to go on in the same character and be Edna so he would have to come out and be John for a second.  But it was pretty phenomenal what he did in heels, too.

What about Nikki?  She was just like scooping ice cream and she’s amazing?

I’m so impressed with everyone in this movie.  I’m mostly impressed with Nikki.  She was 17 when she started, was scooping ice cream.  It’s like a classic Cinderella story, you know.  I was nervous acting with Michelle Pfeiffer, who before I was even an actor watching in films and with John who was an idol of mine growing up and I was nervous and I’d been doing it for 14 years. She comes in and gets thrown into…not only a cast with these people in it but the emotional core of the movie. I mean, she is the protagonist in the movie and everyone follows suit.  She was just tremendous sharing these scenes with Walken and them and not skipping a beat. She was completely calm and what I found interesting was how much inspiration John drew from Nikki and some of the veteran actors drew from the newness from her, her boldness, her courage and she’s just a remarkable talent. I think she’s going to be around. She’s made to do this. She is Nikki, I mean of course she is Nikki—that’s her real name, she is Tracy Turnblad. She’s a young actress who’s trying to succeed and follow her dreams and she has this very fresh clean slate approach.  A very open mind to things and she was just born to do it, you can tell.