17 things you probably didn’t know about ‘Grease’

It’s not uncommon for actors in their early 20s to play teens, but some members of the “Grease” cast were much older than that.

Stockard Channing (Rizzo) was 33, Jamie Donnelly (Jan) was 30, and Olivia Newton-John (Sandy) turned 29 during filming. 

John Travolta (Danny Zuko), Jeff Conaway (Kenickie), and Didi Conn (Frenchy) were some of the younger castmates at 23, 27, and 25, respectively. 

Henry Winkler’s “Happy Days” character, Fonzie, basically was Danny Zuko, so he was a natural first thought for the film.

But Winkler had been playing the ABC role for a decade, so he passed on “Grease.”

During an appearance on “The Rachael Ray Show” in 2019, the actor called it “one of the great decisions” of his life because Travolta “deserved” the role and ended up being so right for it.

Travolta was familiar with the movie’s source material before he was ever considered for the role of Danny Zuko. 

In the early 1970s, the actor played Doody in the Broadway production of the “Grease” musical.

A 2016 Vanity Fair article revealed that Elvis Presley was up for the role of the Teen Angel, which eventually went to “Beach Party” star Frankie Avalon. 

Vanity Fair also reported in 2016 that original drafts of “Grease” included a cameo from The Beach Boys singing “Greased Lightnin’.”

That same clout also came in handy when Travolta asked if his sister, Ellen, could have a small part in the film.

She’s an actor in her own right, but it was her brother who put in the good word for her with the “Grease” production team.

Ellen told The Spokesman-Review in 2018 that she was visiting the set one day when her brother asked if she wanted to be in the movie.

Ellen played one of the waitresses watching the high-school dance contest on TV. Her big line was, “Oh, there’s Danny and Sandy.”

One of the film’s DVD extras revealed that actor Conaway actually gave Channing, his on-screen love interest, hickeys during filming.

The big ending number was supposed to be “All Choked Up” — like it was in the original Broadway version.

At the last minute, however, it was switched to the now-iconic “You’re the One That I Want.”

Kelly Ward, who played Putzie, told Yahoo in the same 2018 interview, “It was lightning-fast work and nobody was really quite sure how it would play, because it’s such a different kind of music than the rest of the score. And nonetheless everybody threw themselves into it.”

The skin-tight black pants that Sandy wears at the end of “Grease” were a vintage pair from the 1950s with a broken zipper. 

Newton-John told The Guardian in 2019 that the costume crew actually had to sew her into them for filming. 

This story was originally published in September 2020 and most recently updated on September 12, 2024. 

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