The conversation with Gene Hackman that Kevin Costner will never forget: “It was an important moment for me”
In the wake of Gene Hackman’s death, countless actors and filmmakers have come forward to pay tribute to his career and share stories of working with him. Hackman worked with some of the greats, including William Friedkin, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Francis Ford Coppola. No matter who his collaborators were or how good the material that he was working with was, his innate gifts as a performer shone through. He looked like an average Joe, but he could run the gamut of emotion, often embodying contradictions like rage and fear, tenderness and danger.
One of the stars who paid tribute to Hackman is Kevin Costner, who starred opposite him in the 1987 erotic thriller No Way Out. Costner plays a young navy officer who is recruited to work for a senior official at the Pentagon, played by Hackman. When Costner begins an affair with a woman who, unbeknownst to him is his boss’s mistress, and she turns up dead, he becomes the prime suspect.
It could have been a boilerplate melodrama, but the film is one of the most underrated erotic thrillers of the 1980s. Even Roger Ebert raved that it was “a superior example of the genre.” Part of that is down to the script, which is far cleverer and more airtight than many other films of its ilk. But much of it has to do with the lead performances. It will come as no surprise that Hackman is riveting as a conflicted, slippery government official, but Costner is just as engaging as a desperate man wrongly accused of a crime he is meant to be investigating.
Costner remembered a particular moment he had with Hackman after the end of a particularly challenging day of shooting. The scene takes place around Hackman’s desk when he tells Costner’s character their mutual love interest is dead. Costner struggled to figure out how to approach the scene and insisted on stopping and starting multiple times as he tried to follow his intuition and figure out where to stand and how to approach the interaction.
At the end of the day, he ran into Hackman in the parking lot as they were getting in their cars to go home, and the older actor called him over. Costner thought he was about to get berated for holding up the production and being disrespectful to the director, but instead, Hackman said something he would never forget.
“You know, I watched you today,” Costner remembered him saying, “And I went through a divorce about three years ago, and I’ve been doing a lot of shitty movies trying to pay for this divorce. And I didn’t feel about acting the way I felt for a long time… I watched you today — I used to feel like that. I was really happy to see you do that.”
He got in his car and drove away, leaving the young actor stunned. “It was a really important moment for me,” Costner remembered. In him, Hackman had seen hunger and dedication to the craft rather than entitlement and ineptitude, and it clearly reawakened something in him that had been missing for several years.
The two actors were at very different stages in their careers at that moment. Costner had yet to stake his claim in Hollywood with Dances With Wolves, while Hackman had already won an Oscar and been one of the industry’s greatest talents for two decades. Interestingly enough, however, both men were on the cusp of some of their greatest success. Four years later, Costner defied all expectations by winning the ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Directing’ Oscars for Dances With Wolves, and three years after that, Hackman won his second Oscar for his unparalleled performance in Unforgiven.
