When Kevin Costner went foraging for magic mushrooms before a sword fight: “Let’s go”
If, like me, Kevin Costner‘s impressive and supremely dense film career can be reduced to a schlocky Hollywood interpretation of an ancient and beloved tale of English morality, then the story I’m about to tell you may burst your bubble just a little bit.
The 1990s were a wild time, and, as well as proliferating ecstasy, birthing Britpop and beginning a cultural revolution that would be awkwardly labelled Cool Britannia, England would also let a stalwart of Tinseltown destroy one of our most beloved tales: Robin Hood.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is by no means a masterpiece. Starring Costner in the lead role, excluding the green tights, the picture delivers a truly garish tale in the long story of the fabled archer. Based on his return from the Crusades (though the brutality of that is neatly plastered over), following horrendous torture and the realisation that his family’s livelihood has been acquired, along with the rule of England, by the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham, our hero sets out on a mission to bring justice to the land he left behind.
Now accompanied by his friend Azeem, played by Morgan Freeman and in pursuit of Maid Marion, he gets together a band of merry men, and you can probably figure out the rest of the story from there. Of course, for a certain generation, myself included, the high-octane account of one of England’s finest heroes was like explosive, arrow-shredding nectar — an action movie built out of English oak. But, for anyone outside of that particular subsection of nincompoops, the main draw of the piece is the villain and the actor who played him.
The Sheriff of Nottingham was cast as a wolf in the Disneyfied version of the story, but he couldn’t get close to bringing the wild, cartoonish brilliance that Alan Rickman brought to the role. Dressed like a combination of Meat Loaf and Frank N Furter, Rickman’s hypercharged delivery makes for a near-comedic level of overacting that really adds charm to this picture. It’s the kind of performance that makes you suppose that there simply must have been drugs on set. In this case, it was true.
During a recent conversation with GQ, Costner revealed how he and his stunt double went foraging for magic mushrooms in the forest during one day’s filming. “I remember hunting some mushrooms out in the field,” Costner explained. His stuntman friend told the actor, “They’re out there,” and so the two men went off to find the speckled keys to a new universe.
It could have been a fairly innocuous moment except, as Costner reveals, “This was that day I had a big sword fight with Alan Rickman that afternoon. We’re out looking for them, everybody went to lunch and he found one, and then he found another, and I couldn’t find one”.
The story continued as Costner’s figurative mushroom basket was left bare: “After about the fifth one he found, I said, ‘Nick, how are you.. I’m looking, how are you finding these mushrooms?’ And he says, ‘Well, you have to eat one, and it tells you where the rest of them are.'”
It turns out, that this level of pagan pursuit was something Costner was now no longer comfortable. “I thought, ‘I’m not eating a mushroom. We’re having a sword fight, Nick’,” Costner exclaimed as the realisation that a stunt coordinator in charge of a steel blade was now heavily intoxicated dawned on him.
“You’ve eaten some mushrooms? Cause, we’re gonna be with swords in about an hour?”
The answer was a simple and devilish one as he admitted to ingesting the hallucinogenic vegetables. Costner offered an equally plain plan: “OK, let’s keep looking, but let’s not eat any more mushrooms.”
Now, we wouldn’t like to suggest that the narcotics had been a part of the set for filming, but there’s a good chance that some were in play during the writing process, the executives’ office that greenlit the movie and with the producers who allowed England’s most beloved vigilante to have a North American accent.
