It’s gonna take more than a few kidney stones to keep Kevin Costner down.
The Academy Award winner revealed that he “worked 10 days under an IV drip” while filming his role as Al Harrison in the 2016 biographical drama Hidden Figures, but he “never missed a day of work.”
“I’ve never worked drunk on a set. I’ve never worked high on a set, but I was on morphine the last two weeks that I worked on [Hidden Figures],” Costner told People, adding: “I don’t even know how. About three days of it I was normal and then something happened to me.”
In between scenes, Costner said he “sat in my trailer with a morphine drip in my arm” and soon had to keep his sleeves rolled down to cover up the IV bruising. “Eventually I had to. I wanted to cry, but there was everybody watching, so I didn’t,” he said.
Costner raved that “it was magic” working with director Theodore Melfi and reuniting with Black or White (2014) co-star Octavia Spencer on the film.
Jim Parsons, Taraji P. Henson and Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures (2016). (20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection)
Based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures starred Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Goble Johnson and Mary Jackson, three African-American mathematicians who were instrumental in winning the Space Race for NASA.
Spencer earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Academy Awards and Golden Globes for her performance, and the film also received a Best Picture nod at the Oscars.