Yellowstone star Kevin Costner ‘one of the most demanding actors in the industry’

The star reportedly wants out of his hit TV show – much to his boss's annoyance. But what Costner wants, he usually gets. Photo / Supplied

On January 10, Kevin Costner won the Best Actor award at the Golden Globes for his performance as the patriarch John Hutton in the neo-western TV series Yellowstone. It is the most watched show on US television at the moment, and testament to Costner’s renewed star power, over three decades after he revived the western genre with his Oscar-winning directorial debut Dances with Wolves.

Anyone might have expected Costner to take to the stage – a decade after his last Golden Globe, for Best Actor in the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys – and make a grateful yet stirring speech, acknowledging his remarkable longevity in a notoriously fickle business, which he has known something of the ups and downs of. Instead, he stayed at home.

Granted, Costner had a reasonable excuse for not attending the ceremony; on the evening, the presenter Regina Hall announced, straight-faced, that: “He so much wanted to be here but because of the unprecedented weather and flooding, he has to shelter in place in Santa Barbara. Jesus.”

This was met with near-incredulous laughter, and so, a few weeks later, Costner made a short video acceptance speech in which he declared: “We watched the whole doggone thing and my kids heard our name be called, and we weren’t at one of the greatest parties in the world. We wanted to be, but we found ourselves together as a family. My children heard my name called, and they stood up and they cheered.” The sentiments of the speech were only slightly spoilt by Costner delivering it from bed, clad in a T-shirt.

If the suspicion lingered that Costner was not taking the award as seriously as he might have, then that reflects the recent controversy over his ongoing participation in the show that he won his Golden Globe for. Well-sourced rumours suggest not only that Costner has tired of appearing in Yellowstone and that he wishes to bow out after the current fifth season – possibly to be replaced by Matthew McConaughey in a spin-off show – but that he has also fallen out with the showrunner Taylor Sheridan, himself no wilting violet when it comes to the possession of a healthy ego.

One anonymous source, speaking to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, referred to Costner and Sheridan as “silverback [gorillas] wrestling”. There may have been some surprise on the actor’s part that Sheridan – who is now responsible for shows including the Yellowstone prequels 1883 and 1923 and the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Tulsa King – is being backed by Paramount, the studio behind the show. Once, Costner’s every wish was acceded to by pliant production companies: those days are gone.

Kevin Costner as "Devil Anse" Hatfield in Hatfields & McCoys. Photo / Supplied

At present, the actor occupies a strange place in the Hollywood firmament, not dissimilar to that of Harrison Ford: coincidentally, the star of Sheridan’s 1923. Costner remains an A-list star because of his television work, for which he’s paid US$1.2 million (NZ$1.9 million) per episode, but he has not had a successful film in which he was the lead attraction since 2015′s sports drama McFarland, USA.

Although he has appeared in acclaimed supporting roles in the likes of Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game – in which, incidentally, he gives a performance of such depth and intelligence as the protagonist’s clinical psychologist father that it’s frustrating that he hasn’t been allowed similar parts – and the Nasa drama Hidden Figures, Costner is no longer a movie star. Instead, he’s a character actor who plays high-profile leads in the likes of Yellowstone and Hatfields & McCoys. And the reason for this might be because of the reputation he has acquired as one of the most demanding actors in the industry today.

After Costner first came to prominence in the ‘80s, thanks to his starring roles in the likes of No Way Out, The Untouchables and Field of Dreams, he declared his ambition of making his directorial debut with the three-hour, largely Lakota-language Dances with Wolves. He was much mocked for his apparent hubris by industry observers, who christened the film “Kevin’s Gate” in reference to the notorious Michael Cimino flop Heaven’s Gate a decade before. Costner had the last laugh when the film was an enormous hit – making a staggering $420 million (NZ$675 million) worldwide – and won seven Oscars, including Best Film and Best Director. He had Hollywood at his feet, and so the next step seemed an obvious one: he would play Robin Hood.

The resulting film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was also a massive hit, but its success belied a notoriously troubled production schedule. Costner had recruited his friend Kevin Reynolds – who had worked uncredited on a major buffalo hunt action scene in Dances with Wolves – to direct, but a combination of an abbreviated pre-production and the presence of the scene-stealing Alan Rickman as the film’s villain, the Sheriff of Nottingham, led Costner to develop previously unsuspected prima donna tendencies.

Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

He was not deaf to rumours that he’d heard that “Rickman’s acting Costner off the screen”, as one crew member told Entertainment Weekly around the time of the film’s release, and so dealt with his potential upstaging in simple fashion. With the producers’ compliance, he locked Reynolds out of the editing room, removed several scenes with the Sheriff and ensured that the film presented him, as the picture’s major star, front and centre.

The results were artistically compromised – Reynolds suggested at the time that “I didn’t feel like it was an improvement at all…I thought in a number of places it was pretty awkward and embarrassing” and called the experience of working with Costner “a pretty painful process for both of us” – but money has always talked louder than anything else in Hollywood. The two men therefore reunited a few years later for the aquatic adventure Waterworld.

By this point, Costner’s star had waned somewhat; he had had hits with Oliver Stone’s JFK and the Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard, but in neither case was he the main attraction, and the film that he had anticipated would be his next big smash, Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp, was well and truly upstaged by the spritelier Tombstone earlier that year.

Waterworld needed to be a hit, in order to maintain Costner’s position in the A-list. Owing to a horrendously difficult water-bound filming schedule (a recurring theme in the actor’s filmography by this point) that saw the budget nearly double from $100 million (NZ$161 million) to $175 million (NZ$281 million), many of the old wounds of Robin Hood reopened – not least because Reynolds’ team were again locked out of the editing room in post-production. The director quit in protest, although he received full credit for his work on the picture.

Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tina Majorino in "Waterworld". Photo / Getty Images

A pre-disgrace Joss Whedon, who was brought in to rewrite the script, summarised his input to the AV Club in 2001: “I was there basically taking notes from Costner, who was very nice, fine to work with, but he was not a writer. And he had written a bunch of stuff that they wouldn’t let their staff touch.” And although it did well enough at the box office, it was not the hit that Costner wanted. This time, the derisory nickname that it attracted was “Fishtar”; an allusion to the Warren Beatty-Dustin Hoffman flop Ishtar.

An insecure Costner now began to make baffling decisions. His sophomore directorial effort, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama The Postman, was the disastrous flop that had been threatening to arrive for some time, and this time Reynolds could not be blamed; it made a mere $20 million (NZ$32 million) on an $80 million budget (NZ$128 million), and its greatest lasting effect was to give Olivia Williams her big break.

A subsequent return to sports dramas with the Sam Raimi-directed baseball picture For Love of the Game should have been uncontroversial, but Costner had a public argument with Universal – who had already been burned by dealing with the actor on Waterworld – about the film’s length and rating; he wanted an expansive, R-rated picture, whereas they wanted something more commercial and PG-13.

Stacey Snider, Universal’s co-chairman, took the unprecedented decision to rebuke the once-mighty star publicly, saying: “Kevin’s not the director and it’s not fair for him to hijack a $50 million (NZ$80 million) asset. I realise this is very much about principle for Kevin, but principle doesn’t mean that you never compromise. Our feeling is that we have backed the filmmaker and his name is Sam Raimi, not Kevin Costner.”

Raimi – then best known for the Evil Dead series, on which he had exerted his own creative control – attempted to be diplomatic. “He challenged me during the editing of the film,” he said, “but if I looked at something or tried it and still wanted to do it my way, he let me make the call.” Yet the Los Angeles Times, in an unflattering profile of the actor-director, could now say: “Costner has been acting more like one of today’s spoiled diamond divas than an old-fashioned hardball hero” and openly refer to him as “a temperamental star”.

The next decade proved an undistinguished one in Costner’s career. Some of the pictures he made were fun – such as the serial killer black comedy Mr Brooks, in which, taking a rare villainous role opposite William Hurt as his imaginary alter ego, Costner took delight in subverting his all-American image – but his reputation for being difficult meant that audiences and studios alike largely abandoned him. It was not until 2012 and the success of Hatfields & McCoys that he was able to return to award-winning stardom.

Perhaps not coincidentally, he reunited with Reynolds for the series; the director had indicated in 2008 that their bust-up was behind them, saying: “I think we’ve reconciled, we’re both a little older and wiser. We’ve put some things behind us and managed to sit down and talk about [Robin Hood], so…it’s not as acrimonious as it was right after Waterworld, that’s for sure.”

Kevin Costner in "Yellowstone". Photo / Supplied

Still, whatever happens between Costner and his latest sparring partner Sheridan, he has a high-profile big-screen project awaiting completion. Entitled Horizon, it returns him to the western genre, for an epic film, apparently in four separate parts, and set before and after the Civil War. With a cast including Sienna Miller, Avatar star Sam Worthington and, of course, Costner himself, it could either be the work that re-establishes him as a force in cinema, or another disastrous flop.

In any case, it sounds as if Costner has at least heeded the advice that Reynolds spat out after he was fired from Waterworld.

“In the future, Costner should only appear in pictures he directs himself,” he said. “That way he can always be working with his favourite actor and his favourite director.”