The performance Kevin Costner never wants anyone to see: “It would only be judged”
While many actors can rightfully be accused of being overprotective of their careers, Kevin Costner isn’t one of them, but that’s only because he’s taken several huge risks that backfired spectacularly.
In an ideal world, or Costner’s version of it, he’d happily be one of the many stars who safeguarded their Hollywood status through success. However, he’s always been too ambitious for such trivialities, and it’s come back to bite him on the arse more than once.
With a four-decade career under his belt that’s yielded countless box office hits and a hatful of major awards, Costner is undoubtedly a very wealthy man. On the other hand, he’d be a damn sight richer if he didn’t develop a habit of spending millions of dollars of his own money on a string of flops.
Yes, Dances with Wolves was an unqualified smash, but the rest of them weren’t so lucky. Costner ploughed vast sums of his personal fortune into Waterworld, The Postman, Swing Vote, Black or White, and Horizon: An American Saga, which probably left his accountant tearing their hair out.
He doesn’t have many regrets, though, apart from Sizzle Beach, USA. It was Costner’s feature debut, and once he became a household name in the late 1980s, he tried to buy back the negative to erase it from the history books. He was unsuccessful, and audiences can still watch the movie, which can’t be said about his contributions to Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill.
Cast as Alex Marshall in what was supposed to be his breakthrough role, all of his scenes were cut, and he ended up as a corpse and nothing more. “We rehearsed for a month,” he lamented to Entertainment Weekly. “Literally 30 days. That really formed how I go about my profession. I absorbed everything about how the set was conducted and the process.”
Costner’s excised scenes from The Big Chill have become the stuff of legend, especially when Kasdan made a promise that they’d never be seen. The two became friends and collaborators who worked together in various capacities on Silverado, The Bodyguard, and Wyatt Earp, and the filmmaker was adamant that he wouldn’t share them with the world.
“His vision trumps people’s curiosity,” Costner explained. “It would only be judged. That movie stands so tall and has such resonance. He laboured over that once; he doesn’t need to labour over it again.” As far as cinema history is concerned, the two-time Academy Award winner will always be a dead body in The Big Chill, with his fleshed-out performance remaining locked away in Kasdan’s vault.
It wouldn’t exactly be a game-changer, with the sequence in question revolving around the core cast making Thanksgiving dinner together, with Jeff Goldblum describing it as “poetic and metaphorical” to add further mystery to the scene nobody has been allowed to see for 40 years.
It’s bad news for Costner completionists, but there’s something admirable about Kasdan sticking to his guns in the age of director’s cuts, YouTube, and seemingly lost footage being dredged up and shared online with increasing regularity.
