The actor who couldn’t compete with Robert De Niro: “It was hard for me to survive in those scenes”
Working with a star the calibre of Robert De Niro can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, sharing the screen with such a legend could seriously raise an actor’s profile, especially if they’re seen to be on the same level as the great man. On the other hand, if you’re going to go toe-to-toe with one of the best to ever do it, you’d better be able to bring your A-game.
Kevin Costner knows this all too well. He appeared opposite De Niro in Brian De Palma’s real-life gangster flick The Untouchables. Costner plays legendary lawman Eliot Ness, who is tasked with reducing crime in Chicago with the help of his mentor, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery). De Niro stars in the role he was born to play – Al Capone. The two sides do battle across the Windy City during the prohibition era, with the historical icons sharing multiple scenes together. For Costner, this dynamic presented a very unique challenge.
“I had trouble with some of the scenes with [De Niro], because my character was very straight-arrow,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “Robert was able to jump off the page. I was trying to survive with my straight-arrow language against someone who was throwing a level of street language at me that had a level of improv to it. So it was hard for me to survive in some of those scenes, and Sean talked to me a little bit about it.”
The characters of Ness and Capone are designed to be polar opposites. The former is a straight-laced, by-the-book cop who wants to restore justice the right way, whilst the latter lives outside of the rules, flaunting his criminal status openly to a police force powerless to stop him. On paper, one of these archetypes is way cooler than the other, so it was always going to be an uphill battle for Costner to get audiences to root for his uptight hero of De Niro’s slick villain.
The Untouchables came about at a very pivotal time in Costner’s career. He had just broken through with his leading role in the 1985 Western Silverado, so he needed another big hit to solidify his status as a bankable frontman. Ness had obtained semi-mythical status in the US, which presented another make-or-break situation for Costner. Get the part right, and immortality was his. Get it wrong, and he’d forever be associated with sullying the name of an American hero.
“I remember checking on him and his life,” Costner said of becoming the morally airtight cop, whose efforts to bring down Capone were largely unappreciated in his own lifetime. “It wasn’t as rosy as people might want to think,” Costner admits. “But the truth is, you’re stuck inside the lines of something that’s written… I understood history of him, but I really was having to play this character.” Luckily for our Kev, the movie went down a treat, scoring strong reviews and making over four times its original budget at the box office.
As the old saying goes, iron sharpens iron, but that doesn’t mean it’s not intimidating to be directly compared to someone like De Niro. Costner was able to overcome his character’s shortcomings and present a likeable, well-rounded good guy for the infamous gangster to go up against.
