“I wish I was a better actor”: why Kevin Costner regretted his inexperience while making ‘The Untouchables’
Between 1987 and 1991, Kevin Costner cemented his status in Hollywood as a leading man with a run of hit movies that included No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and JFK.
During that period, he went from rookie status to Oscar-winning actor and director, which is incredible when you think it all happened in the space of only four years. Costner’s ascent to the top arguably began with another film in 1987, though, one which he has fond memories of, but in hindsight regrets his inexperience at the time he landed the role.
Costner has always been honest about how green he was when he first made his way out to Hollywood in the early ’80s from his native Lynwood, California. He had been inspired to pursue acting by a chance encounter with Richard Burton on a plane in ’78 and wound up driving his truck out to Los Angeles without much of a plan of how to make it in the movie business. He told The Independent, “No one gave me a chance. I certainly didn’t know how it worked.”
Costner confessed to parking by a phone booth on La Brea or Sunset Boulevard and sleeping in his truck overnight because he just wanted to stay near the business. “I knew I needed to come into Hollywood every day – I just didn’t know where to go,” he chuckled.
Through sheer force of will and a single-minded focus on his goal, the young star soon fumbled his way into small parts in movies like Sizzle Beach USA and Night Shift before the 1985 Western Silverado helped him break out. By the time he found himself cast as legendary federal agent Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s Prohibition epic The Untouchables, though, Costner had only starred as the lead in a handful of small movies. Suddenly, he found himself leading a big-budget crime movie opposite legends of the game like Sean Connery and Robert De Niro – but he still wasn’t overly confident in his acting bonafides. He needed help if he was going to keep his head above water.
Thankfully, in 2024, Costner revealed that Connery – who starred in the film as Ness’ tough-as-nails Chicago cop mentor, James Malone, took him under his wing. He told GQ: “He always called me ‘Mr Ness.’ ‘Mr Ness, can I talk to you?'” he smiled, “We became friends.”
Costner recalled that Connery was particularly helpful when he struggled with some of his scenes opposite De Niro, who had been given license to chew the scenery with reckless abandon as the terrifying gangster Al Capone.
“My character was very straight-arrow, and Robert was able to jump off the page,” Costner explained in 2017. “I was trying to survive with my straight-arrow language against someone who was throwing a level of street language at me that had a level of improv to it. So, it was hard for me to survive in some of those scenes, and Sean talked to me a little bit about it.”
In his own head, Costner was sure that this inexperience with high-level Hollywood acting would make someone like Connery think less of him. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case at all, and Costner explained, “He was good to me. And I learned a lot because my eyes were open.”
Ultimately, Costner mused, “I wish I was a better actor when I did The Untouchables, but I was where I was at.”
Ultimately, Costner may have had a false impression of the limitations of his acting because his performance in The Untouchables is always cited as one of his best. For his part, Connery always maintained the mentor-mentee relationship that defined their characters was reflected in the actor’s real-life relationship.
It was obvious how much their time together meant to Costner when he paid tribute after Connery’s death in 2020 by saying, “He was the biggest star that I ever worked with, and I will be forever grateful to be linked with him on film.”
