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(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros / Ariela Ortiz-Barrantes)
Sat 17 May 2025 18:45, UK
It was only natural that Kevin Costner would regularly be compared to Clint Eastwood during his initial surge up the industry ladder, with the two actors and filmmakers having enough in common to make it an obvious analogy for anyone who viewed the former as the pretender to the latter’s throne.
For one thing, they both loved westerns. Costner was raised on a steady diet of genre films hailing from some of the medium’s most famous filmmakers, and it instilled him with a love for stories set on the sprawling plains of the Old West that would dictate the direction of his career for better and worse.
Whereas Eastwood was called the heir to John Wayne’s mantle when the Dollars trilogy established him as the new face of the western in the 1960s, Costner was placed in a similar boat after a star-making turn in 1985’s Silverado, which eventually led him to Dances with Wolves several years later.
If anything, that was the film where he outstripped Eastwood. Sure, the Dirty Harry icon had directed more movies, but it wasn’t lost on anyone that Costner had arguably beaten him at his own game by directing, producing, and playing the lead role in a western that not only won multiple Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, but became the genre’s highest-grossing release ever.
Costner would never hit those heights again as an actor or filmmaker, despite his frequent returns to Stetsons and six-shooters in the likes of Wyatt Earp, Open Range, and The Postman. He even got the chance to work – and argue – with Eastwood on the set of 1993’s A Perfect World, where they played the two lead roles.
However, Eastwood’s magnum opus was the one that got away from Costner, after he admitted to Howard Stern that he’d spent the better part of a decade trying to secure the rights to the David Webb Peoples screenplay that eventually made it to the screen as Unforgiven.
“For eight years I chased it,” he confirmed. “It was called Whore’s Gold. That was a movie I wanted to do as a bookend to Dances with Wolves.” Eastwood only ended up with the script when Francis Ford Coppola dropped it, and he sat on the story for years until he felt the time was right to play William Munny, with patience proving to be a major virtue, given the film’s critical, commercial, and awards season success.
Meanwhile, Costner repeatedly tried to reclaim the rights, only to run into brick wall after brick wall. Unforgiven will always stand tall as Eastwood’s towering achievement on both sides of the camera, but it’s fascinating to think how it would have turned out had it ended up in Costner’s hands when he would have approached it almost the same way by directing, producing, and embodying the vengeful protagonist.
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