The role Kevin Costner snatched away from Robin Williams: “Why did you wait for me?”
The biggest stars in the business always reside at the top of every casting wish list, so there’s always plenty of crossover between them when a high-profile production is in the works. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, few were bigger than Kevin Costner, and he had two notable adversaries.
Whenever a studio executive drew up tentative plans for a movie designed to appeal to a mainstream audience, Costner’s name was near the summit. So were Harrison Ford’s and Mel Gibson’s, though, which constantly left their agents and representatives passing like ships in the night.
Costner turned down the leading role in The Hunt for Red October, and so did Ford before it was eventually played by Alec Baldwin, who ended up being replaced by Ford for Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games before he eventually made his way into the franchise with Shadow Recruit.
Meanwhile, Gibson was originally attached to play Elliott Ness in The Untouchables, declined Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because he didn’t want to do consecutive period pieces after Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, while he and Ford both resisted Oliver Stone’s overtures to bring Jim Garrison to life in JFK.
However, one actor it’s hard to imagine Costner competing with is Robin Williams. For one thing, their public and professional personas were markedly different, with the former the living, breathing embodiment of modern Americana and the latter an improvisational firebrand prone to going off-script.
They were both A-listers, albeit for very different reasons. And yet, when the producers initially overlooked Costner for Field of Dreams because they weren’t convinced he’d want to do another baseball film so soon after Bull Durham, they went to Williams and began negotiating before he caught wind of the picture.
One person who was never particularly high on the exuberant funnyman was writer and director Phil Alden Robinson, with Costner recalling how Ray Kinsella was almost out of reach. “There was an idea that maybe Robin Williams was going to do it, who I thought was sensational,” the two-time Academy Award winner explained to Entertainment Weekly.
“And when I finally asked Phil, I said, ‘Well, why did you wait for me? Because I think Robin’s really great’. And he was like, ‘I do too.'” The breaking point was Field of Dreams‘ fantastical elements, with Robinson unconvinced that Williams could rein himself in to make the far-fetched seem as believable as he’d envisioned.
“But I think that Robin could hear voices in the corn, and I needed a guy that you don’t believe is going to hear a voice in a cornfield,” Costner was told. “And I thought that was a really insightful thing. I get a lot of credit for Field of Dreams, and all the credit goes to Phil. I just played it.”
It’s impossible to say it didn’t work out in everyone’s best interests: Costner landed one of his most famous roles in a ‘Best Picture’ nominee that made big money at the box office, while Williams’ 1989 outing was Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, which earned more from cinemas, also made that year’s ‘Best Picture’ shortlist, and secured him a ‘Best Actor’ nomination.
