John Travolta smiles politely as the waiter delivers the caviar with a bowl of lemon wedges on the side – just the way he ordered it. “When I heard Tom Hanks was going to do the part, I was envious,” Travolta admits. Five years earlier, his nephew had planted a seed in the actor’s head. “He said to me, ‘Uncle Johnny, you remind me so much of President Clinton,’” Travolta recalls. “I thought, 'By God, if I ever did play a president, he is the only one I could get away with.'”

Travolta had received the novel as a gift when unmasking Anonymous was D.C.’s summer diversion of 1996. But, like Nichols, he couldn’t get through it on the first try. “I read parts of it and thought it was interesting,” Travolta explains. “Clearly, it was about someone that I thought we all knew, and I wondered how much of it was accurate, how much of it wasn’t – that kind of thing. It intrigued me and entertained me all at once.” When Nichols asked for a meeting, the actor went into campaign mode.

Nichols, who had never met Travolta, arrived on the set of Mad City and waited in the actor’s trailer. When Travolta entered, he hugged Nichols. “That was his hello,” the director beams. “I thought, Here’s the guy. This guy is a politician. He’s such a loving guy, and he leads with his heart.” And so, Travolta would be paid $18 million to play Governor Jack Stanton.

To prepare, the actor streaked his hair gray and bulked up from 205 to 222 pounds. “To be honest, without bullshitting you, I knew I could emanate the qualities of this character,” he tells me. “There are similarities in our PR, in our manners, and that kind of thing.” He also studied videotapes of Clinton on the stump. He was fascinated with the footage that showed Clinton repeatedly popping out of his limousine to win over a heckler while leaving a rally: “It was more revealing than anything else.”