“I was born 30 years too late”: the 1989 co-star who called Kevin Costner the second coming of Gary Cooper
Kevin Costner found an advocate in one of cinema’s most legendary actors.
There has never been another actor like Kevin Costner, who somehow emerged from a legendary deleted scene to become one of the most likeable, bankable, and successful leading men in the industry for over a decade, and even managed to pick up the Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for his debut film behind the camera.
Although he is notorious for having a massive ego, his insistence on taking creative control of the films that he stars in usually pays off, as his instincts more than often prove right.
Costner’s career had begun to take off in the late 1980s because he proved that he was an appropriate leading man for nearly every genre; he did a western with Silverado, a romantic comedy with Bull Durham, a crime epic with The Untouchables, and a spy thriller with No Way Out. However, Field of Dreams was a much different task because it was hard to put a finger on what type of film it was supposed to be; it was simultaneously a sports film, a family drama, a fantasy, and a spiritual journey about the idealism of the ‘American Dream’.
Although playing a father and lifelong baseball fan required Costner to turn in one of his most complex performances to date, he benefited from having a legendary co-star in James Earl Jones, who, at that point was best known for being the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise but was also an acclaimed stage actor, a notable voice-over artist, and an Oscar nominee for The Great White Hope.
Given that Jones was an established icon and Costner tended to speak highly of himself, it might have seemed like the two would clash, but the former spoke very highly of the latter, and even compared him to another great actor. “Watching Kevin on the monitor on location, I had to admit, it was Gary Cooper,” Jones noted, “Gary Cooper was always looking to spit. He and Kevin have the same pucker in the mouth”.
Jones’ assessment wasn’t entirely an off-base claim relating to just their looks; Cooper had represented an all-American style of wholesome integrity, and Costner was asked to do the same thing in Field of Dreams. Notably, the latter followed in Cooper’s footsteps, given that they both had a keen interest in westerns, with even Jones admitting that he would have loved to make more westerns during the golden age of Hollywood.
“I’d have loved to spend five or six years in the studio system doing all those cowboy pictures,” Jones said, “I was born 30 years too late for the kind of cinema I’d like to do”.
It would be Costner who would bring back the type of old-fashioned westerns that were most similar to Cooper’s films. Although Dances With Wolves was praised as being a historical drama and a Civil War epic, Costner also modelled it after a classic western, and continued in that pursuit for the rest of the films that he directed. The Postman revamped the western mythology in a post-apocalyptic setting, Open Range was a more classical cowboy film, and the ambitious Horizon: An American Saga project was intended to be a generation-spanning tapestry of American history, even if it is unclear if it will ever be completed.
