The moment Kevin Costner came eye-to-eye with Sean Connery: “It’s going to be a long day”
When Kevin Costner worked with the larger-than-life screen icon Sean Connery for the first time, it would be fair to say he was still a little wet behind the ears.
The year was 1986, the movie was The Untouchables, and Costner had been cast in his first humongous studio lead role as crusading Treasury Agent Eliot Ness.
Director Brian de Palma was telling the story of Ness and his team of ‘untouchable’ agents, given carte blanche by the Bureau of Prohibition to bring bootlegging gangster Al Capone (Robert De Niro) to justice by any means necessary. One of those agents was a tough Irish-American cop named James Malone, an old-school lawman who teaches Ness what he calls “the Chicago Way” for taking down criminals. Namely, whatever they do, you return tenfold. Oh, and never bring a goddamn knife to a gunfight.
Naturally, when casting an eye around Hollywood for the perfect star to play a Chicago man with Irish roots, De Palma settled on the industry’s most famous Scotsman, whose accent has never even come within a whiff of Irish or American. To the director’s credit, though, he applied the same logic to the casting as the movie business always has with the star once known as James Bond: he’ll sound like Sean Connery no matter who he’s playing, and that’s fine. Why? Because he’s Sean freakin’ Connery.
According to Costner, as soon as he began working on the movie with Connery, he received a quick crash course in how to conduct himself like a leading man, both on-set and off. “The smarter directors do this a lot of times,” Costner told Front Row Features in 2014. “They’ll take a supporting role and they’ll put a leading man in it, because they know how to inhabit the screen.”
So, when De Palma cast Connery as “the little Irish street cop”, Costner saw firsthand how true movie star presence and charisma can change a role. “You realised how formidable he was,” Costner recalled, adding that De Palma, “could have easily cast any character actor to bring up that Irish brogue,” but instead, he sought the biggest star Costner has ever worked with, before or since. “What happens is he just knows how to hold onto the screen,” Costner marvelled.
As he grew in his own career and became a leading man arguably every bit as legendary as Connery, Costner never forgot that lesson in sheer star power from Connery. He even recognised when the industry felt he had aged into the Connery lane, such as when Kenneth Branagh cast him as Chris Pine’s gruff mentor in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. In that movie, he tried his best to hold the screen like Connery did, but also utilised some practical advice Connery swore by on The Untouchables.
“I remember a big scene with De Niro that was coming up,” Costner remembered, thinking back on how nervous he was before shooting a pivotal moment with the menacing Taxi Driver star. Everyone was idly chatting and milling around before cameras rolled, with Costner among them. All of a sudden, Connery addressed him with his character’s name, “Mr Ness,” and told him to “sit down.” When Costner asked why, Connery again implored him to take a seat and look him in the eye.
Finally, Costner relented and sat down. It was only when he was face-to-face with Connery that the elder statesman said, “It’s going to be a long day,” and Costner realised he was advising him to conserve his energy for the scene, instead of wasting it on pacing back and forth. “He talked about practical shit,” Costner said with a smile. “Like, ‘It’s going to be a long day. You and I are going to sit here, and we’re going to watch, and when it’s our turn, we’ll be ready.’” Simple advice? Sure. Unexpectedly invaluable, though? Definitely.
