Kevin Costner certainly didn’t care about anything more than expressing his feelings for his late The Bodyguard co-star Whitney Houston, as he refused the idea of cutting the eulogy short for commercial purposes.
The actor remembered when someone suggested he summarise what he had stored in the speech for the late Houston as CNN was broadcasting the funeral live.
“I had been working on this speech… and I tried to compile everything I wanted to do and finally crafted this speech,” Costner reminisced on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
“Somebody said, ‘CNN’s here, they wouldn’t mind if your remarks were kept shorter because they’re going to have commercials.’ And I said, ‘They can get over that. They can play the commercial while I’m talking, I don’t care.'”
Costner also recalled how he was hesitant at first to speak at Houston’s funeral, but Dionne Warwick encouraged.
“I could feel the weight on her, now it’s shifted to me,” Costner said. “What am I going to say about this little girl? [I] went back to that church in Newark and it was filled. It was electric. There were two bands playing, the church was alive. It was like, boom!”
The actor also remembered Houston’s struggle for his role in The Bodyguard, as the director of the film, Mick Jackson felt “uncomfortable” casting her.
“I really knew who I wanted,” Costner said. “There was a moment where she trusted me. And as I looked at her and … I started to guide her, and I wasn’t trying to usurp my director, but I had made a promise to her — not to f*cking him. And [to] the movie.”
He continued, “I had promised Whitney that she’d be good in it. And that was my promise to her. She’s always going to love me in the song, and I was always going to keep my promise to her.”