Face/Off Werb and Michael Colleary tried to sell to a studio from as early as 1990. The first actors who were chosen to play Sean Archer and Castor Troy were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger respectively but John Woo instead hired John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to play those characters. It took numerous studios, producers and rewrites before John Woo became attached several years later. For the Archer character, Woo considered casting either Michael Douglas or Jean-Claude Van Damme with whom he had worked in "Hard Target". When the film was eventually made, Douglas served as an executive producer. Werb and
John Travolta an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, making him, at age 24, one of the youngest performers ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. His mother and his sister Ann appeared very briefly in "Saturday Night Fever" and his sister Ellen played a waitress in "Grease". Travolta performed several of the songs on the "Grease" soundtrack album. In 1980, Travolta inspired a nationwide country music craze that followed on the heels of his hit film "Urban Cowboy", in which he starred with Debra Winger. After "Urban Cowboy", Travolta starred in a series of commercial and critical failures that sidelined his