Kevin Costner names the most disappointing roles of his career: “Movies that on paper were really good”
In an industry where only a select few stars are popular and powerful enough to dictate the direction of their careers, there’s something almost cruelly ironic about Kevin Costner entering that bracket and then using his newfound clout to effectively render himself irrelevant and obsolete as a mainstream entity.
From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, he was undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s marquee names. Costner lent his name to an ongoing stream of box office hits, critical favourites, and occasional awards season darlings, and it looked as though Dances with Wolves would take him to the next level.
His feature-length directorial debut won seven Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, establishing him as a valuable commodity as an actor, producer, and filmmaker, and he was only 35 when it was released in cinemas and became the highest-grossing western in cinema history.
It’s not an understatement to say he was on top of the world, and the wins kept stacking up after Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Oliver Stone’s JFK, iconic romance The Bodyguard, and Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World kept him firmly on the A-list. However, every actor is only one film away from disaster, and when Costner followed up Waterworld with The Postman, it was a two-for-one nightmare.
The latter was a critical pariah, a commercial catastrophe, and swept the board at the Razzies, exiling Costner from the A-list for the next two decades. In the eyes of the public, he was back to square one, and his subsequent attempts to claw his way back up the ladder didn’t exactly go smoothly.
He publicly feuded with the producers of Sam Raimi’s 1999 romantic drama Message in a Bottle over ten seconds of cut footage; political thriller Thirteen Days fell well short of recouping its budget in ticket sales, and 3000 Miles to Graceland was another huge bomb.
Returning to romance yet again, Luis Mandoki’s Message in a Bottle did at least turn a profit, but Costner wound up on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Actor’. Seeking a change of pace, he headlined Tom Shadyac’s supernatural thriller Dragonfly, which was panned so heavily it became the worst-reviewed movie of his entire career. Needless to say, they weren’t high points.
“You take a movie like Dragonfly or Message in a Bottle,” he told Female while reflecting on his biggest disappointments. “Movies that on paper were really good, I think were ultimately flattened out into a very soft love story. There is a reason why I did those movies, but you don’t ultimately get to see it, and I don’t understand why.”
Message in a Bottle allowed Costner to work with one of his idols, Paul Newman, so it wasn’t a total bust. The same can’t be said about Dragonfly, though, which never felt like anything other than a shameless attempt to capitalise on the success of The Sixth Sense. Apparently, they had potential when the leading man signed on, but audiences never got the chance to find out.
