Not many actors are as lucky in their careers as John Travolta. Sure, your Tom Hankses and Jack Nicholsons have remained at the top of the Hollywood A-list for decades, but they don’t know the bitter taste of Tinseltown rejection following stardom quite like Johnny T. In the 1970s, Travolta rose to stardom with Welcome Back, Kotter and became a full-fledged movie star with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, only to fall into a pit of box office bombs for much of the 1980s. If Quentin Tarantino hadn’t taken a chance with him in Pulp Fiction, we might be asking, “Whatever happened to that guy from the talking baby movies?”

While John Travolta has been part of plenty of solid movies — and just as many flops — over his four decade-long career, he’s missed out on a number of incredibly big roles. When Travolta squandered a prime acting opportunity, Tom Hanks was usually hanging around to pick up the slack.

1. Rambo: First Blood I and II (1982, 1985): It seemed like nearly any working actor in 1981 was in the running to play John Rambo, with everyone from Kris Kristofferson to Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino throwing their names in the hat. John Travolta didn’t get the part, of course, but his name came up again when Rambo First: Blood Part II rolled around. Producers were interested in having Travolta play Rambo’s partner, but Stallone quickly nixed the idea.

2. Top Gun (1986): Tom Cruise had a lot of competition for the role of Maverick, going up against Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Nicolas Cage, and Charlie Sheen. Travolta was considered for the part, but producers felt that his agent was asking for too much, especially considering his string of box office flops like, Two of a Kind, at the time.

3. The Doors (1991): Not unlike some of Oliver Stone’s other projects, his script for The Doors movie kicked around for the better part of a decade before the cameras started rolling. During that time, actors like Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Johnny Depp — no surprise there — and John Travolta expressed interest in the film. The script was even passed around to real-life rock stars Bono, Michael Hutchence, and Ian Astbury before it was decided that Val Kilmer was fit to play the lizard king.

4. Forrest Gump (1994): ’94 was a good year for John Travolta — he’d made a huge comeback as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction — but it could have been an even bigger year. Travolta was the original choice by Robert Zemeckis for Forrest, but he declined the role, later admitting that it was a mistake and that it should have been him rambling on about life and chocolates on that park bench.