Kevin Costner had nothing but praise for the late Gene Hackman — who was found dead at age 95 in his home alongside his wife earlier this week — even decades after they worked together on the 1987 thriller No Way Out.
In the wake of Hackman’s mysterious passing this week, a moment from a 2017 interview with Costner on The Rich Eisen Show has been unearthed, in which he deemed Hackman “the best actor I ever worked with,” per the Daily Mail.
Though the Yellowstone alum noted that Sean Connery, whom he co-starred alongside in The Untouchables that same year, “was the biggest star [he] ever worked with,” Costner proceeded to recall a powerful moment on set with Hackman.
“We had been doing every scene to that point around a desk, just like this,” he explained. “Every scene. I finally, I said to the director, ‘I don’t feel like it’s right.’ Gene Hackman’s standing there listening.”
Acknowledging that he and director Roger Donaldson “really butted heads on it,” Costner eventually declared, “I don’t care, it’s here.”
“And I hated to do that, but I just said, ‘It’s here. And I don’t need all of our scenes here. It’s here,’” he continued. “So we did it. And at one point they were saying, ‘Well, what’s Gene going to do?’ And I said, ‘Gene will figure out what to do because he’s really good. He’ll figure out what to do.’”
After shooting the scene “all day,” which ended up in the film, Costner was beckoned by Hackman while he was heading out to his car. While Costner was expecting Hackman to call him out for “disrespect,” he got just the opposite.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Hey, you know, I went through a divorce, I’ve been doing a lot of kind of questionable movies lately. When I saw you fighting for what you wanted today… it reminded me of how I used to feel about acting,’” he said of Hackman. “He says, ‘It was good what you did.’ An then he just got in his car and drove off.”
Other former co-stars of Hackman’s have shared memories of working with him, including Bill Murray, who opened up about working with him on 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums in an upcoming segment of The Drew Barrymore Show.
“I sympathize with Gene because to him [director] Wes Anderson was just a punk kid and Gene’s made some of the greatest American movies,” Murray shared in a teaser for the March 4 episode. “So he was a little irritable, you know. He was a little irritable but he had to work with children, dogs, Kumar [Pallana], who was an absolute mystery to all of us anyway. They put him in very challenging positions to work and so he just felt a lot of responsibility and kept thinking, ‘What am I doing here with these people?’ But the performance he gives is brilliant.”
