ROYALS'It Got Kind of Ugly': Kevin Costner Reveals He Was in a Heated Feud With the Royal Family After Princess Diana's Tragic Death
June 20 2024, Published 12:50 p.m. ET
Kevin Costner revealed he was embroiled in a nasty feud with the royal family in the '90s.
The actor, 69, confirmed that a sequel to the 1992 film The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston was in the works with Princess Diana being his costar. However, after Diana died in the summer of 1997, the flick was canceled.
Princess Diana died in 1997.
“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 recalled while on The Howard Stern Show.
“Like, ‘No, that’s not true.’ And it got actually kind of ugly,” Costner continued. “And I let it go for a while. It just got uglier and uglier.”
Kevin Costner was friends with Princess Diana.
The Yellowstone alum reached out to Sarah Ferguson, who was previously married to Prince Andrew, to figure out what he should do amid the sticky situation.
“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,'" he recalled.
Kevin Costner scrapped 'The Bodyguard 2' after Princess Diana's death.
Costner was trying to make The Bodyguard 2 with Diana, who was separated from her former husband Prince Charles (now King Charles) at the time.
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Princess Diana apparently 'fancied' Kevin Costner.
“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 noted of how the royal signed on in the first place. “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.”
He added, “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.”
After Diana died in a sudden car crash in Paris, France, in 1997 at the age of 36, Costner knew the movie couldn't continue.
“I could not replace Princess Di,” he said.
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As OK! previously reported, Costner remembered a conversation he had with Prince William about his late mother.
"I happened to be in England, and I got this message that the prince would love to talk, and I said, 'What?'... and then I went, 'Okay,'" he dished. "We met in this room, and it was just us."
"He walked up, and we shook hands," Costner continued. "The first line out of his mouth was, 'You know, my mom kind of fancied you.'"
