How Kevin Costner helped Harrison Ford land one of his biggest hits
The biggest stars in Hollywood are regularly under consideration for the same roles, which created an inextricable link between Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford that ended up yielding several huge hits, awards season favourites, and catastrophic bombs after they were drawn into a number of shared orbits.
As two of the most popular and bankable names in the business during the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was inevitable that Costner and Ford would be up for the same parts, but it’s the volume of them – and the combination of coincidences and after-effects – that makes their connection so fascinating.
Costner was the first choice to play Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, which he turned down in favour of making his directorial debut on Dances with Wolves, a shrewd decision that led to huge box office success and a pair of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Ford rejected the opportunity, too, only to eventually replace Alec Baldwin in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger before Costner circled back around decades later to play Thomas Harper in Chris Pine’s ill-fated Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
Oliver Stone confirmed Ford had been offered the part of Jim Garrison in JFK, saying that while “Harrison Ford was terrified of it” due to the risk involved, “Kevin has guts”. The filmmaker also admitted that Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves credibility helped secure the budget necessary to tell the story he wanted to tell, thanks to having one of Tinseltown’s hottest commodities front and centre.
Wolfgang Petersen’s action classic Air Force One was another that furthered the inadvertent dovetailing between the two stars, although Ford ended up with the much sweeter end of the deal. President James Marshall was Costner’s for the taking, but as Ford told the Los Angeles Times, his contemporary and peer ended up offering it directly to him instead.
“This was a script that Kevin Costner originally had and he gave it to me,” the Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon explained. “Kevin knew this was a big commercial movie and his schedule didn’t allow him to do it”. Even if he made it clear that “Kevin and I are not intimates,” Ford did concede Costner went seriously up in his estimation “because he really threw a winner my way”.
Whereas Air Force One would go on to become a commercial smash and the second highest-grossing film of Ford’s entire career outside of his signature franchises behind only The Fugitive, things didn’t work out quite so well for Costner when The Postman released the very same year.
An unmitigated disaster on all fronts, the post-apocalyptic folly tanked in cinemas and swept the board at the Golden Raspberry Awards by winning all five of its nominations for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Screenplay’, and ‘Worst Original Song’, which may have left him regretting his decision.
