Has Kevin Costner ever recovered from 1995 and Waterworld?

From the outside, walking away from Yellowstone after winning a Golden Globe looks like a crazy decision. But this is what Kevin Costner has done. The role as Montana rancher John Dutton in Taylor Sheridan’s hit TV series didn’t exactly rescue his career, but it put him back on the A-list. Now, he is quitting the show and fans are up in arms.

The Oscar-winner was being offered a reported $12m (£9.61m) fee for season five (part of which he had already shot) and an equal amount for two further seasons. When he recently broke his silence about his shock departure from the show – despite its rave reviews – his answers, given in court during his divorce case, earlier this month, weren’t especially illuminating. He referred obliquely to “issues about creative” and talked about a “logjam” – but he didn’t seem in any mood to overturn his decision.

The ornery actor, now a major powerbroker in Hollywood, has certainly travelled a long way since that toe-curling moment in 1990 when, as a shuffling, awkward and callow figure, he went backstage to meet pop star Madonna during her Blond Ambition world tour. Costner was wearing spectacles and had a Chris Waddle-style mullet, presumably because he had just been starring in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). He told Madonna, then at the zenith of her fame, that her performance was “neat…really neat”. The second he turned his back, she made a vomiting gesture. “Neat, anybody who says my show is neat has to go,” she murmured in contempt as the cowboy star retreated.

This was one of the incidents captured in the 1991 documentary, Madonna: Truth or Dare (aka In Bed with Madonna). Costner came out of it terribly. By then, he had already had a string of major box office hits, The Untouchables (1987), Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), and his Oscar winner Dances with Wolves (1990) among them, but next to the Material Girl, he seemed dull, bland and condescending, with little of the charisma or presence he projects so easily as Dutton in Yellowstone.

To his admirers, Costner was seen then as a throwback: a clean-cut leading man who possessed the qualities of stars from an earlier era like Gary Cooper or James Stewart. He was wholesome, rugged and undemonstrative. To his detractors, that was precisely the problem. He didn’t seem to have any kind of inner world. There was none of the intensity or emotional turmoil in his performances that you found in those of Method actors like Marlon Brando or Al Pacino. He didn’t do neurosis or doubt. “The mediocre is where he seems most comfortable,” a UK newspaper sniped at him.

Today, Costner is arguably more famous than ever, more respected as an actor and with an increasingly complex public image. The deep controversy he is embroiled in over his career choices has eclipsed any embarrassment over the long-forgotten Madonna meeting. He has starred in Yellowstone since 2018. The drama – one of the most popular on American TV – is like a cross between King Lear and a Dallas-style soap opera. It combines cowboy elements with plot lines involving family feuding, big city politics, exploitation of Native Americans and crooked real estate deals. Costner is superb. He brings pathos, cunning, ruthlessness and a sometimes surprising generosity of spirit to his role as the old-time rancher struggling to adapt to changing times.

Fans were therefore even more dismayed when the actor jumped ship halfway through season five. The first eight episodes have already been released. Another six are due this autumn – but are yet to be shot. Costner’s sudden departure seemed like an act of betrayal, stealing away from audiences the chance to discover just how Dutton’s fraught relationship with his adopted son Jamie (Wes Bentley) will be resolved. Will he kill Jamie? Might there be reconciliation? What will happen to Dutton himself – and what about the ranch he has fought so hard to keep in the family?

Rather than answer these questions, Costner has been concentrating on finalising his expensive divorce and working on his own wildly ambitious new movie project, Horizon: An American Saga. He is starring in, directing, producing and has co-scripted the epic, four-film franchise backed by Warner Bros and New Line. The supporting cast includes Sam Worthington, Sienna Miller and Danny Huston.

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“It’s really a character study of a lot of people. It covers about 30 years … it starts before the civil war and carries through,” the actor-director told Empire in a 2016 podcast. He has described the project as being “about America’s settlement of the West and all of the aspects that it entailed”. In other words, this is a Westward Ho epic ploughing very similar terrain to Yellowstone and its offshoots.

In many ways, Horizon looks like one of those megalomaniacal endeavours that Costner has periodically undertaken throughout his career. He rolled the dice in a similar way on Dances with Wolves. When no one in Hollywood would finance it because it was a three-hour-long western and Costner, then a first-time director, was demanding final cut, he simply went to Europe and found the money there instead. The movie was a triumph.

Costner gambled again, but lost, with his soggy 1995 Waterworld, playing a drifter in the post-apocalyptic saga directed by Kevin Reynolds. This still ranks as one of the most expensive films ever made, but received very mixed reviews and barely recouped its costs. He followed that up with another film in the same genre, The Postman (1997) which he directed and starred in as the former shipping clerk turned visionary leader in postal uniform. All the movie really delivered, though, was stinking reviews. It swept the board at that year’s Golden Raspberries picking up five awards including Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Director.

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With his usual obdurate stoicism, Costner took the setback in his stride. A few years later, he directed the well-received western, Open Range (2003), which may not have matched the box office business of Dances with Wolves but re-established his credentials as a filmmaker and chronicler of the Old West.

The 68-year-old actor-director remains an enigmatic and often puzzling figure. He was never the all-American figure audiences took him for after his breakthrough role as Elliot Ness, gunning for Chicago mobster Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). He always had a strong streak of stubbornness. Early in his career, he was mocked for “starring” in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983) but then not making it onto the screen. The film is about the reunion of a group of thirtysomething college friends after one of them (Costner’s character) takes his own life. This was supposed to have been his big break but his face wasn’t even seen. The 15-minute flashback in which he had appeared was cut out altogether.

Costner later claimed about being cut out of the movie that “everything that needed to happen for me at that point did … the moment I got the part I knew my life had changed”. Being cast by a big-name director in such a prestigious movie easily outweighed actually featuring in the film. Besides, Kasdan later made it up to him by casting him in an eye-catching role in Silverado.

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However, his co-star Meg Tilly suggested being frozen out of The Big Chill hurt far more than he let on. She remembers Costner saying to his colleagues “F*** you! Some day I am going to be bigger than all of you.” He was “very amiable, friendly and nice” but she saw another more ruthless and ambitious side of him.

Arguably, Costner is better at playing dreamers and outsiders than the conventional heroes for which he is celebrated.  He has made a large number of sports movies in which he is invariably cast as the underdog. There was his “Crash” Davis, the long-in-the-tooth Minor League baseball player competing with talented but erratic rookie Tim Robbins for Susan Sarandon’s affections in Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham (1988). He was even better as the alcoholic, washed-up golf pro Roy McAvoy in Shelton’s Tin Cup (1996). The John Daly-like Roy “drinks too much booze and doesn’t eat enough vegetables”. He has the “shanks” on the course and off it; it’s his parlance for when he can’t get it up. He enters the US Open via qualifying not because he really thinks he can win but because he wants to make a good impression on the glamorous psychologist (Rene Russo) to whom he has been giving lessons.

In playing such roles, Costner drew on his own blue-collar background. He grew up in southern California as the son of an electrician who worked for the Edison Company.  Before making it as an actor, he drove trucks and took jobs on commercial fishing boats. “I knew how to work because of the background I came from. My dad was a kind of hard-scrabble guy,” he told TV host, comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla in a 2013 interview.

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He reminisced about his stuttering start to his movie career, when as a young would-be actor, he didn’t know anyone in Hollywood. He used to drive there in his truck, just to be in the right vicinity. “I didn’t even know who to call … I was humiliated more than once. I was said ‘no’ to a thousand times,” he said. It took him seven years to get Screen Actors Guild (SAG) membership that he desperately needed. “It was not an overnight thing for me. It was a long road, I didn’t really make a cheque until I was 27 or 28,” he said in a Screen Actors Guild Foundation masterclass he gave in 2014. He described himself as “a plodder” who perseveres.

Costner is also defiant, continually swimming against the current. He made westerns when other filmmakers, even Clint Eastwood, seemed to be giving up on them. Along with his more affable characters, he has played serial killers and psychopaths. As he turns his back on Yellowstone, the veteran star is yet again going his own way regardless of the consequences. He first started talking about making Horizon in 1988, before he had even made Dances with Wolves. Now, 37 years later, he finally has the chance to get the project done.

“In my career, I’ve tried to choose not based on what was popular. I made the films I wanted to make,” Costner recently told People. Now that’s a sentiment that even Madonna might think is neat.