Who knew Kevin Costner was “this” close to rubbing shoulders with the “People’s Princess.”
According to the former Yellowstone actor, Costner and Princess Diana were almost paired together for an on-screen romance but it never came to fruition.
During an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, the Oscar winner said a sequel to his 1992 movie The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston was in the works, but with Princess Diana taking up the role as his costar.
But unfortunately, the princess died in a tragic car crash in Paris, France, the summer of 1997 at the age of 36, forcing the movie to be shelved.
“I could not replace Princess Di,” he said.
Right after, things went downhill with the royal family.
“It got kind of ugly,” Costner said. “When Diana passed, about a year later it had leaked out that I was prepping Bodyguard 2 with her.”
“And what happened was, the royal family kind of turned on me a little bit,” he continued. “Like, ‘No, that’s not true.’ And it got actually kind of ugly. And I let it go for a while. It just got uglier and uglier.”
As it turns out, the now 68-year-old actor reached out to the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, for advice on how to handle the tricky situation. At the time, Ferguson had just gotten a divorce from Prince Andrew.
Her advice to Costner was to just let it go, but that didn’t stop the actor from eventually speaking with the family.
“Finally I called up Sarah and said, ‘Sarah, you need to tell me who is leading the charge there on this thing.’ She goes, ‘No, no, no, Kev, you don’t want to talk to them.’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ I called them up and I said, ‘I’m telling you something, you need to stop, because it is true. And if you don’t stop, I’m gonna start. Because it was,’” Costner recalled.
When Costner was in talks to make the sequel to the classic film, Princess Diana had just separated from her former husband Prince Charles, now King Charles, at the time.
Costner revealed that it was indeed Ferguson who initially connected him with the princess for the movie and recalled when he reached out to her to tell her about the role.
“What had happened was, I started talking to her through Sarah, and I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna do Bodyguard 2 and I think I can build this around you. Would you be interested?’” he explained to Diana. “And she goes, ‘Yes. My life’s about to change.’ I didn’t really go into depth with it, but I thought I understood what she was saying.”
“She was very sweet and we talked. The second time we talked she said, ‘Is there going to be a kissing scene?’ I said, ‘Do you want there to be one?’ She said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Then we’ll do that.’ I wasn’t going to make the full romance about her. But there was going to be a moment that we did. And she was so sweet about this,” he added.
Much later, the actor found out that Diana actually had a crush on him during that time. In an interview with People, Costner shared that Prince William told him about how his late mother felt during a meeting some years ago.
“We met in this room, and it was just us,” Costner explained to People. “He walked up, and we shook hands … The first line out of his mouth was, ‘You know, my mom kind of fancied you.’”
—EmilyAnn Jackman, pennlive.com (TNS)
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