Even though he’s made a few idiotic decisions throughout his career, Kevin Costner is a smart man. He’s got a tendency to get a little too high on his own supply, but nobody finds the kind of success that he has if they’re not switched on.
Obviously, Costner could have stayed on the A-list a lot longer than he did if he hadn’t been so susceptible to stroking his ego, and there’s a very good reason why so many people have said that investing millions of your own dollars into a movie production is a fool’s errand.
This being Costner, though, he’s done it multiple times. It worked the first time around when Dances with Wolves won him Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ and became the highest-grossing western in cinema history, but the law of diminishing returns has set in, which is probably an understatement.
He was savvy enough to position himself as one of the biggest stars in the business in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but after his Oscar-snaffling epic brought him as close to the sun as he could get without burning his wings, the actor and filmmaker eventually flew directly into it and burned to a crisp.
Even when Yellowstone brought him back to prominence, he walked away to spend a ludicrous amount of his personal wealth on Horizon, which hasn’t been going very well. Ironically, the two actors he named as his favourite co-stars of all time were notoriously tricky to deal with during contractual negotiations and on set, which indicates that Costner learned fuck all from either of them.
He even separated them by category, just so he wasn’t playing favourites. Ever the gentleman, Costner defined them by what most people would agree they were: one was a movie star and the other was an actor, and they impacted him in completely different ways on completely different movies.
“I’d have to tell you that my favourite star to work with had to be Sean Connery,” he told the Denver Post. “I would say Gene Hackman was the actor I learned the most from. I worked with Sean on The Untouchables, and we just connected immediately. He’s a real guy’s guy, and he just has this great honesty about him. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly. It was a joy and a pleasure working with him.”
Costner had previously admitted he was intimidated by the original James Bond when they shared the screen in Brian De Palma’s crime classic, and he wasn’t the only one. Connery had that nature about him, but if he called somebody ‘boy’, it meant they’d made it onto his good side.
Hackman could also be prickly, but Costner was happy to soak up as much knowledge as possible when they collaborated on No Way Out. “If you want to talk about working with an actor I learned from, it would be Hackman,” he declared. “His approach was so professional and he was so prepared.”
Sorry, any actor who worked with Costner after 1987, when those two films were released, but you never stood a chance of cracking his all-time top two.
