50 Fun Facts About Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner played Alex, the dead friend whose funeral reunites the cast, in which 1983 film that cut his scenes?

The Big Chill shows Costner only as the body in the coffin during the opening titles. Its director felt so bad about the cut flashbacks that he gave Costner a part in his next film.

Which actor won an Oscar as the veteran Irish-American beat cop who mentors Kevin Costner's hero in The Untouchables?

Sean Connery took Best Supporting Actor for the part, yet a 2003 Empire poll voted it the worst film accent of all, because his Scottish burr never went away.

Kevin Costner was first lined up to play the president in Air Force One, then personally offered the role to whom?

Harrison Ford took the part after Costner, the first choice to play the president, chose to concentrate on finishing The Postman. The film he gave away was a hit; the one he kept was a commercial disappointment.

Which pop superstar made her film acting debut opposite Kevin Costner in the 1992 thriller The Bodyguard?

Whitney Houston turned the film into a music phenomenon: its soundtrack became the best-selling soundtrack album of all time and won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

After The Bodyguard became a hit, Kevin Costner asked which real-life royal to star in a planned sequel?

Princess Diana agreed to take the part, Costner has said. A draft of the screenplay was finished the day before she died in 1997, and the film was scrapped.

Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves beat which Martin Scorsese film to Best Picture at the 1991 Oscars?

Goodfellas lost both Best Picture and Best Director to Costner's first film as a director. Dances With Wolves was the first western to take the top prize since Cimarron in 1931.

Which singer pretended to gag on camera after Kevin Costner mildly praised her concert in a 1991 tour documentary?

Madonna kept the moment in her film Truth or Dare. Costner had come backstage after a Blond Ambition tour show, and she waited until he had left the room.

Kevin Costner bought a company in 1995 to develop machines, based on a government patent, that clean up what?

Oil spills were the target: the machines separate oil from water. They found few takers until the Gulf of Mexico disaster of 2010, when BP leased 32 of them.

Which real-life Prohibition agent did Kevin Costner play in the 1987 gangster film The Untouchables?

Eliot Ness led the small team of agents sent after Al Capone in Chicago. The part made Costner a star, though Jack Nicholson had been announced for it two years earlier.

In which Midwestern state does Kevin Costner's farmer build a ballpark in his cornfield in Field of Dreams?

Iowa still has the field: the diamond built for the film on a farm near Dyersville is kept as a tourist attraction, and Major League Baseball staged a game in the cornfields beside it in 2021.

Much of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves is spoken, with English subtitles, in which Native American language?

Lakota lines were translated for the cast by Doris Leader Charge, who taught the language at a university. An elder who advised on the film later adopted Costner into his family.

In Dances With Wolves, what does Kevin Costner's Lieutenant Dunbar name the wolf that keeps visiting his post?

Two Socks is the reason for the film's title: the tribe watch Dunbar playing chase with the animal and give him a name that translates as Dances With Wolves.

Which actor won a BAFTA as the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Kevin Costner's Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves?

Alan Rickman thought the script so weak that he secretly asked two writer friends to punch up his lines. The studio later demanded re-edits to stop his villain stealing the film.

Which singer's ballad from Kevin Costner's Robin Hood film spent sixteen straight weeks at UK number one in 1991?

Bryan Adams and his co-writer Mutt Lange wrote the ballad in 45 minutes. Its unbroken run at the top beat a UK chart record that had stood since 1955.

Which actor played the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson opposite Kevin Costner in the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams?

Ray Liotta won the part even though the director had pictured a man in his forties, a father figure to Costner. Liotta had the sense of danger the director wanted in the banned outfielder.

Who wrote the 1970s country song that became the worldwide hit ballad of Kevin Costner's film The Bodyguard?

Dolly Parton wrote it in 1973 as a farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner, as she left their partnership for a solo career. Her own recording was a country single years before the film.

Kevin Costner's 1992 hit The Bodyguard was first written in the 1970s as a vehicle for which movie star?

Steve McQueen was meant to star opposite a Motown singer, but he pulled out of negotiations. The script had been passed over 67 times before a studio bought it, and then waited until 1992 to reach the screen.

Which star directed Kevin Costner as an escaped convict in A Perfect World and also played the lawman chasing him?

Clint Eastwood took the role of the Texas Ranger only because Costner suggested it. The part was small enough to let him spend most of the shoot behind the camera.

Kevin Costner's Yellowstone character owns the largest cattle ranch in which US state, where the series is set?

Montana also supplied the main set: the real Chief Joseph Ranch near Darby stands in as the family home. The story was first written as a film before it became a series.

What is the name of the ranch-owning patriarch Kevin Costner played in the television drama Yellowstone from 2018?

John Dutton was the first regular television series role of Costner's career, taken when he was already in his sixties. It brought him a Golden Globe in 2023.

Which film star did a newlywed Kevin Costner approach on a 1978 flight home to ask about becoming an actor?

Richard Burton told the young stranger that an acting life without private turmoil was possible, and urged him to try. Costner, flying back from his honeymoon in Mexico, credits the chat with setting his course.

Which actress played baseball devotee Annie Savoy opposite Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins in the 1988 comedy Bull Durham?

Susan Sarandon found more than a hit: she and Tim Robbins became a couple that year and stayed together until 2009.

Kevin Costner's Bull Durham character, minor-league veteran Crash Davis, plays which position on the baseball field?

Catcher Crash Davis took his name from a real ballplayer, Lawrence Davis, but his manner was modelled on the weary outlaw William Holden played in The Wild Bunch.

In Oliver Stone's JFK, Kevin Costner plays which real New Orleans prosecutor who reopens a president's murder case?

Jim Garrison appears in the film himself, cast as Chief Justice Earl Warren, the head of the official inquiry whose lone-gunman conclusion he rejected.

Which actor played the Deacon, the pirate leader hunting Kevin Costner's Mariner in the 1995 epic Waterworld?

Dennis Hopper stood by the much-mocked production, saying it got a bad name for itself in the United States but did really well in Europe and Asia.

Kevin Costner's troubled sea epic Waterworld was shot on floating sets in the ocean off which US state?

Hawaii's seas proved costly: one of the floating sets sank in heavy weather and had to be repaired. The shoot still added more than $35 million to the state's economy.

Kevin Costner's 1997 film The Postman swept five of which mock awards, including Worst Picture, Actor and Director?

Golden Raspberries went to the film in every category it was nominated for. It took $17 million in the United States and Canada against a budget of about $80 million.

Which rock star has a cameo as the mayor of Bridge City in Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic film The Postman?

Tom Petty appears to be playing a future version of himself, something the dialogue implies without ever quite saying. Costner both directed the film and starred in it.

In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner's driving-range pro Roy McAvoy throws away his chance on the final hole of which golf major?

The U.S. Open slips away as McAvoy keeps hitting into the water, finally holing out with his twelfth shot. Costner learned his swing for the film from the golfer Gary McCord, who also appears in it.

Kevin Costner's breakout role as Jake, a gunfighter's younger brother, came in which 1985 western with Kevin Kline?

Silverado was a peace offering: its director had cut every one of Costner's scenes from his previous film and promised him a part in a future project.

Kevin Costner's Emmy-winning Hatfields & McCoys, set in Appalachia, was actually filmed in which European country?

Romania's Carpathians stood in for the Appalachians, with the shoot based just outside Brasov. The first part drew 13.9 million viewers, at the time a record for ad-supported cable outside sport.

Which screenwriter of the drug-war thriller Sicario co-created Kevin Costner's ranch drama Yellowstone?

Taylor Sheridan first wrote the story as a film, drawing on his years living in rural Texas and Wyoming, and pitched it as a western answer to The Godfather.

Kevin Costner put $38 million of his own money into which western epic, launched at Cannes in 2024?

Horizon: An American Saga got a nine-minute standing ovation at its festival premiere. The first chapter then sold so few tickets that the second was pulled from its release date.

In The Highwaymen, Kevin Costner plays retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who is hired to hunt down which outlaws?

Bonnie and Clyde are tracked across the country by Hamer and his old partner Maney Gault, played by Woody Harrelson, in a version of the story told from the lawmen's side.

Kevin Costner plays White House aide Kenny O'Donnell during which Cold War emergency in the film Thirteen Days?

The Cuban Missile Crisis drama shares its title with Robert Kennedy's memoir, but it is based on a different book, built from the White House's own tape recordings.

In Hidden Figures, Kevin Costner's gruff supervisor tears down a segregated restroom sign at which government agency?

NASA never employed the man Costner plays: he is a fictional boss, created to simplify a more complex management structure. The real Space Task Group was led by Robert Gilruth.

Which actress played Kevin Costner's wife in both the Superman film Man of Steel and the thriller Let Him Go?

Diane Lane was Martha Kent to his Jonathan Kent, the Kansas couple who raise the future hero. Seven years later the pair played grandparents trying to rescue a grandson from a dangerous family.

In the 2019 film The Art of Racing in the Rain, Kevin Costner voices the narrator Enzo, who is what?

A dog tells the whole story of his racing-driver owner, and the part was the first voice role in a film of Costner's long career. Enzo was played on screen by a retriever named Parker.

Kevin Costner's 1999 romance Message in a Bottle was the first film adapted from a novel by which author?

Nicholas Sparks had published the book only a year earlier, and a run of adaptations followed, among them The Notebook and A Walk to Remember.

Kevin Costner founded and fronts a country rock band, which began a world tour in 2007, billed as Kevin Costner & what?

Modern West was started with the encouragement of his then wife, Christine, and its first world tour took in Istanbul and Rome. One album was written in the voice of his Yellowstone rancher.

Kevin Costner opened the Midnight Star casino and restaurant in 1991 in which South Dakota gold-rush town?

Deadwood kept his casino for 26 years: he closed it in 2017 and sold it in 2020. A dispute with its former managers over what it was worth went all the way to the state supreme court.

Tatanka, the attraction Kevin Costner opened in 2004, centres on bronze sculptures of riders chasing which animal?

Bison give the site its full name, Tatanka: The Story of the Bison. Fourteen bronze animals flee three hunters on horseback, and three of them are posed in mid-air over a cliff edge.

In 1983 an unknown Kevin Costner appeared in a television commercial for the Lisa, a computer made by which company?

Apple sold the Lisa as the first mass-market computer worked through a graphical interface rather than typed commands. Costner was still two years away from his breakout film role.

Which actor played the Secretary of Defense whose mistress falls for Kevin Costner's naval officer in No Way Out?

Gene Hackman's politician sets off a manhunt inside the Pentagon. The 1987 thriller was the third film drawn from the novel The Big Clock, and it helped make Costner a star.

Which actor did Kevin Costner cast as trail boss Spearman in Open Range, giving him top billing over himself?

Robert Duvall was the only actor Costner had in mind, and he said he might not have made the film without him. Duvall broke six ribs when a horse threw him during practice for the part.

Kevin Costner's 1994 epic Wyatt Earp was beaten to cinemas by six months by which rival film about the same lawman?

Tombstone cost $25 million and took $73 million, while Costner's three-hour version failed to earn back its budget. He had been involved with the rival project before making his own.

In For Love of the Game, Kevin Costner's ageing pitcher Billy Chapel throws a perfect game for which team?

Detroit Tigers veteran Chapel does it at Yankee Stadium, in what may be the last start of a 19-year career with the club. The real broadcaster Vin Scully calls the play.

In Draft Day, Kevin Costner plays Sonny Weaver Jr., the general manager of which long-suffering NFL team?

Cleveland Browns boss Weaver trades for the first overall pick on the morning of the draft. In the story he had also fired his own father, a legendary coach of the team.

In a 2006 drama, Kevin Costner's veteran rescue swimmer trains Ashton Kutcher's cocky recruit for which US service?

The Coast Guard school in The Guardian trains its rescue swimmers in Louisiana. Costner's instructor arrives shaken by survivor guilt, and his tally of rescues makes him a legend to the students.

Which director, a longtime friend of Costner, made Fandango, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld with him?

Kevin Reynolds was the reason Costner agreed to play Robin Hood at all, after first rejecting the script. Their friendship was strained when the director walked out during the film's editing.