COSTNER RIDES AGAIN
The veteran actor saddles up for his latest TV project, the modern ranching drama Yellowstone.
L
ike many other kids of a certain age, and a certain era, young Kevin Costner used the backyard of his parents’ house in Southern California as a playground. That’s where he and his friends would often play cowboys and Indians.
And if you think the boy who grew up to star in several Western-themed films—including Open Range, Silverado, Wyatt
Earp and his Oscar-winning opus, Dances With Wolves—made an early career choice to play a cowboy, you’d be wrong.
“I much rather wanted to be the Indian,” Costner says. “I felt the freedom, how they had to coexist with the land. Sign me up for that anytime.”
In Yellowstone, which marks his first foray into regular series television, he’s not playing a Native American, but he’s certainly coexisting with the land—and fighting for it. The 10-episode drama, premiering June 20 on the Paramount Network (formerly Spike), puts him in the starring spotlight as John Dutton, the hard-nosed, leathery patriarch of a Montana ranch roughly the size of Rhode Island. “It’s the right thing that came along,” Costner, 63, explains in the measured tones so familiar from roles in dozens of movies spanning nearly four decades, including Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, The Bodyguard, The Untouchables, JFK and Hidden Figures. Costner’s set to film season two in Utah this summer and is already eyeing a third season.
A WESTERN PURIST
This should be where Costner takes credit for putting a modern twist on a time-honored genre that he personally revitalized. After all, in Yellowstone, during Dutton’s quest to protect his property from interlopers, family feuds erupt, guns blaze, horses gallop, cattle (and sometimes people) are branded, property is set on fire and danger is the air. Sweeping, wide-open-places vistas provide the backdrop for high-stakes drama.
But that doesn’t make Yellowstone a Western or his character a cowboy, Costner says. “Dutton is like a business CEO. He struggles because he can’t deal with the problems the way his great-great-grandfathers did.” In the first season of the series, Dutton and his family come under “a strategic white-collar attack. Land grabs, the EPA, urbanization—these are modern issues. Yellowstone is a drama that exists properly in [its] era.” Dutton also is a single dad, and part of the story is about trying to rein in his four grown children, played by Wes Bentley, Luke Grimes, Dave Annable and Kelly Reilly.
“The West was filled with people who could reinvent themselves,” Costner says. “Men and women were fractured from the Civil War, and a lot of people took their skills out to the West. Then someone looked up and saw there was no law and they could do whatever they wanted.”
Costner is a purist when it comes to Western movies, such as his favorites, including director John Ford’s The Searchers and the sprawling How
the West Was Won. It’s all about context, setting and era. Many Westerns, he claims, don’t grasp this concept. “A good Western is really hard to make,” he says. “Hard to write. When you make them, they stand the test of time. When a Western is sloppy, it sets them back. You need to find the shadings between a black hat and a white hat.”
RIDING INTO HOLLYWOOD
Costner donned the first of what would be several career hats in the movie Silverado back in 1985. “That part was full of juice!” Costner recalls of his breakout performance as a hero-to-be who helps clean up (and clean out) a town held under the sway of a corrupt sheriff. The movie came just in time, two years after he was famously cut from The Big Chill. (He filmed several scenes as Alex, whose death sets off the big reunion for the rest of the all-star cast.)
Costner’s hot streak galloped off after Silverado. One of Hollywood’s most bankable stars for the next two decades, his movies have grossed more than $2 billion overall, and counting.
Dances With Wolves (1990), in which he played a Civil War soldier who befriends a tribe of Lakota Indians, brought him his greatest acclaim and made him a superstar. The heartbreaking drama was also awarded seven Oscars, including Best Director (for Costner) and Best Picture.
He now has nearly 60 movie and TV credits, including a strong turn as the father of Jessica Chastain’s character in last year’s gambling movie
Molly’s Game. And he drifted back to the horses in the 2012 History Channel miniseries Hatfields & McCoys, which brought him an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
“That was a powerful moment,” he says. “People tend to think my acting is natural. They don’t realize how much hard work I’ve put into it to make it seamless.”
Yet despite his easy fit in the wild, wild West, he insists he doesn’t have a special affinity for the genre. “I don’t gravitate to Westerns,” he says, “they just find me.” As do sportsrelated movies, such as Draft Day,
Tin Cup and McFarland, USA. “I’ve been sent scripts for 100 baseball movies and said no to 97 of them. The three I’ve done [Bull Durham,
Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game]—I don’t see them as ‘baseball movies.’ There’s more to them. I respond to the stories.”
FAMILY VALUES
Born in Lynwood, Calif., the son of a welfare-worker mother and a father who worked as an electric line servicer for Southern California Edison, Costner remembers moving around a lot as a kid. Later, as a parent himself, he was determined to place family values over A-list opulence. Even at the height of his fame, he took his three eldest kids (with his first wife, his California State University at Fullerton sweetheart, Cindy Silva) to the set of his films, and then “we would just live our lives normally” in Santa Barbara, about 90 miles north of Hollywood.
Today, his children from his first marriage have followed his footsteps into the entertainment business. Annie, 34, runs her own documentary production company. Lily, 31, is a singersongwriter, and Joe, 30, works as a music producer and sound engineer.
And Costner is knee-deep in round two of parenting, as he and his wife of 13 years, Christine Baumgartner, 44, a model and handbag designer, are raising sons Cayden, 11, and Hayes, 9, and daughter Grace, 8. (Son Liam, 22, is from his previous relationship with Bridget Rooney, the niece of one of the owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers.)
The Costners live on 17 acres of beachfront property in Santa Barbara but often head to their 160-acre ranch just outside Aspen, Colo., to get on horseback and decompress.
Like several other actors,
Costner fronts a band—he formed Modern West in 2007— and he takes it as seriously as his day job. “We’ve played the Grand Ole Opry three times, and the Kremlin,” Costner says. “This has been life-altering for me.”
As for the name of the band, don’t read too much into it— especially the “West” part. “Our songs are pretty Americana,” he says. “I’ve never liked the name. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t even have one.”
The message here: Don’t fence him in musically, moviewise or any other way. “I think it would be a mistake to stand back and look at myself,” he says. “I need to keep being relevant. I just keep searching for that next story that feels like a big secret you can’t wait to tell someone.”
He says he’s comfortable with the road his career has taken him—and wherever that road will continue to take him. “I want to go down another river, I want to go over another mountain,” he says. “I want to walk through another forest. I can’t stand the idea of a little bit of adventure.
“I can’t see any reason to ride into the sunset.”