The scene Kevin Costner regrets shooting: “It seems like all this is an opportunity to titillate”
In the early 1990s, the slow-burning rise of Kevin Costner as a Hollywood leading man finally caught fire. With the Oscar-winning success of Dances with Wolves, the actor who had charmed audiences in The Untouchables, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams, was suddenly an A-list superstar. He was the kind of actor that men wanted to be, and women wanted to be with, and it seemed like the world was his for the taking.
There was one glaring problem with this scenario, though: Costner didn’t want to be the kind of star Hollywood was attempting to mould him into. When he spoke to the New York Times on the eve of the release of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, his blockbuster follow-up to Dances with Wolves, it was staggering how many times the interviewer mentioned his foul mood. Indeed, the star was nervous about the movie coming out, but it wasn’t because rumours of his dicey English accent as Nottingham’s favourite swashbuckling hero had hit the tabloids.
Instead, Costner was miffed about Warner Bros playing up his growing reputation as a sex symbol in the movie’s trailer. It placed particular focus on a scene in which Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s Maid Marian catches a glimpse of Costner’s Robin of Locksley swimming naked, and the camera lingers longingly on Costner’s body in a manner he wasn’t best pleased with. You see, Costner claimed he only agreed to shoot the scene because the intent in the script was not to give the ladies in the audience a show. Instead, it was to highlight the toll Robin’s quest to gain revenge on the evil Sheriff of Nottingham had taken on his body.
“There was a reason for that scene that’s not there anymore, so it seems maybe gratuitous or seems like all this is an opportunity to…titillate,” Costner grumbled. “But it’s not. The whole point of that scene was when she sees him, he has tremendous scars on his back from prison, and the camera never picked it up; and out of that, she begins to change.”
To Costner, the scene was about showing that Robin has “been disfigured a little bit, violated that way” by his mission, which “puts another interesting spin on the movie”. That’s a vastly different intent than the studio’s marketing team hinted at in the trailer, and the scene lost all meaning when presented out of context. As an extra irony, Costner pointed out that the studio had attempted to excite the public under false pretences because the bare behind glimpsed in the swimming scene wasn’t even his; it was his body double’s.
Suffice it to say, fielding questions about his naked posterior was not what Costner imagined when he signed up for the movie, and it must have made him regret shooting the scene in the first place. He admitted that the increase in fame that came with Dances with Wolves threw him for a loop, referring to it as a “quantum leap that occurred with the public” and admitting that things “changed for me in ways that were difficult to anticipate.” One of these difficult changes was accepting that he was now a pin-up, and that status had become an inextricable part of his screen persona, whether he liked it or not.
Dealing with that unfortunate reality led to the bad mood mentioned ad nauseum by the Times’ reporter, who even saw Costner glare at a group of middle-aged female fans politely asking for a picture with him. “OK,” he reluctantly agreed through gritted teeth, “but can’t you see I’m being interviewed?!”
