The one role Kevin Costner said he was destined to play: “I didn’t choose it, it chose me”
It’s entirely down to personal preference whether it’s a good or bad thing, but Kevin Costner has always carried himself with a sense of self-importance that hasn’t always benefited his career.
He became a star in the 1980s because he was handsome, charming, charismatic, and starred in a number of genre flicks that played to his strengths, appealed to mainstream audiences, and could typically be relied on to do a solid turn at the box office.
Titles like Fandango, Silverado, The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams helped make him one of Hollywood’s biggest and most bankable names, but something changed after Dances with Wolves. Maybe that’s when that aforementioned self-importance began to creep in, because Costner started taking himself awfully seriously from then on.
Sure, he still dabbled in blockbuster fare in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Bodyguard, and A Perfect World, but the new and not necessarily improved portentous side of the actor and filmmaker began emerging when Wyatt Earp, Waterworld, and The Postman came across more like vanity projects than passion projects.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a performer taking their work seriously, but it felt like Costner had all the fun sucked out of him and had it replaced with ponderous, overlong, and self-absorbed productions that usually cost a lot of money and didn’t make a lot of it back.
The Postman in particular set him back by years, if not decades, but even when he mounted his first comeback attempt in the 2000s and early 2010s with the well-received Open Range and acclaimed miniseries Hatfields & McCoys, he couldn’t help but sound a touch pompous.
Take 2014’s drama Black or White, for example. Costner stars as a widower raising his granddaughter alone following the death of his wife, who gets drawn into a custody battle when the child’s paternal grandmother attempts to place her in the care of her drug-addicted father.
When asked what drew him to the role of Elliot Anderson, Costner’s response was several levels above actorly. “I didn’t choose it; it chose me,” he declared. “It’s the same thing as a good book. I heard the words, and they spoke to me.”
That’s fair enough, but it’s not as if the script walked up to his front door and started reciting the dialogue page for page, luring him in like a cartoon character succumbing to the irresistible lure of the steam emanating from a freshly-baked pie sitting on a windowsill.
This also being Costner, when he discovered that no studio or production company was willing to fund Black or White, he paid for the whole thing himself. While that lends credence to his feelings of pre-ordained destiny, it wasn’t exactly the first, or last, time he spent millions of his own money on a film.
