Kevin Costner reveals how he made himself ill while making movie
Actor Kevin Costner has prided himself on going to great lengths in order to deliver his movie performances, especially 2016’s Hidden Figures, when his work ethic made him become severely ill during shooting.
The biographical drama film was directed by Theodore Melfi, loosely made on the non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, which tells of the female African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA during the Space Race.
In an interview with People, Costner, who starred in the film alongside Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst and Glen Powell, as NASA boss Al Harrison, explained how he was ill during the shoot.
“I’ve never worked drunk on a set. I’ve never worked high on a set, but I was on morphine the last two weeks that I worked on Hidden Figures,” Costner noted before going on to describe the extent of his sickness and how he refused to stop working during his period of poor health.
Costner continued, “[I] worked 10 days under an IV drip. I don’t even know how. About three days of it I was normal and then something happened to me.” According to the actor, he has “never missed a day of work”, but during Hidden Figures, he has to sit in his “trailer with a morphine drip in my arm.”
Having had an IV drip in his arm for several days, there was naturally some bruising, but eventually, Costner had to roll his sleeves up, showing the cast and crew the lengths he had gone to play his character ever when he was ill. “I wanted to cry, but there was everybody watching, so I didn’t,” the actor admitted.
Costner recently left the Western drama TV series Yellowstone, although he feels that there has been a series of “untrue rumours” about his decision to depart the show after playing protagonist John Dutton for four and a half seasons.
“I was disappointed that nobody on [the studio] side… ever stepped up to defend what it was I actually did for them,” Costner said. “There came a moment where I thought, ‘Wow, when is somebody going to say something about what I have done versus what I haven’t done?'”
Costner has since made the first instalment of his four-part Horizon: An American Saga film series, although he admitted that he has personally had to finance the film by re-mortgaging his ranch.
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