While the world has spent the week laughing about John Travolta’s now-infamous VMAs gaffe, the star has remained pretty quiet on the matter – until now.
John has given his side of the story after viewers of Monday night’s ceremony saw him seemingly mistake Drag Race star Jade Jolie for Taylor Swift while presenting an award.
However, the actor has insisted this wasn’t the case and claimed the confusion was actually him trying to look for Taylor on the stage.
Speaking on US radio station Hot 93.3, John said: “There’s so many people that bombarded the stage, that I was looking for [Taylor]. So the video has me trying to find her, and you know, I thought it was so funny the way it was interpreted. And it’s cool, I didn’t care.”
Referencing his infamous Oscars 2014 flub where he mistakenly introduced Idina Menzel as “Adele Dazeem”, he continued: “If I shave my head, it’s headlines. If I mispronounce something, that’s headlines, and I know that about me.
“Sometimes I fantasise, what if I had given it to [Jolie]? That would have been awesome. I should have just gone all the way with it.
“I have a sense of humour about all of that — I always have — because, look, we’re in pretty good shape on any given day that that kind of thing could make headlines,” he added.
And it seems Taylor took the incident in good humour too.
Todrick Hall – who was also on stage at the time, having starred in Taylor’s video for You Need To Calm Down – said she laughed the whole thing off.
“I loved it,” Todrick told Jerry O’Connell on his talk show Jerry O. “We talked about it backstage, and Taylor thought it was hilarious.
“Jade Jolie has made quite the living performing ... at Play Nightclub, and she is a fantastic drag queen,” he said. “But everybody knows that she is like the Taylor Swift doppelgänger. So I think that was like the highest compliment he could ever pay her.”