The terrible movie Kevin Costner turned down “two or three times” but made anyway

Posted On September 29, 2025September 29, 2025

Every now and then, a Hollywood A-lister will talk about how they repeatedly turned a role down, only for it to become one of their greatest parts. Unfortunately for Kevin Costner, this is not what happened to him in the 2010s, and he learned the hard way that he should have trusted his gut.

By the time Costner hit his late 50s, he had settled into a groove of playing reliable older guys with deep reserves of wisdom in their hearts. He played Superman’s noble, self-sacrificing Earth dad, Jonathan Kent, in 2013’s Man of Steel, an iconic CIA analyst’s Navy commander mentor in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and legendary track and field coach Jim White in McFarland, USA. However, none of these roles was remotely like the one director Ariel Vromen approached him about in 2014, and he was initially baffled as to why the Israeli filmmaker thought of him.

“I don’t know why they cast me,” Costner admitted to the Toronto Sun in 2016, during the same press tour in which he told The Yorkshire Post, “I kept looking in the mirror, questioning, ‘Why me?’ I’m a cowboy, I play baseball.” What kind of character did Vromen want him to play that shocked him so much? Well, to put it simply, a cold-hearted psychopath.

The director was putting together Criminal, an action-thriller about a dead CIA agent whose memories are implanted in the brain of a merciless fucking killer who is the only man with the requisite skills to finish a dangerous job. Vromen pictured Costner, a man audiences have always associated with playing virtuous heroes like Robin Hood and Eliot Ness, as the kind of vicious character who would kill without remorse and threaten to rape a woman while he robbed her house. Naturally, Costner was skeptical.

“I turned it down two or three times,” Costner confessed, which shows how nervous he was about stepping outside his comfort zone in such a big way. “I said, ‘I don’t even know why you’d come after me for this.’” However, after time spent looking in the mirror at his ageing, grizzled face, he realised, “You’re not in Fandango anymore.” This face, all lines and wrinkles, told the story of a life, and Costner felt it could be moulded into something darker. Suddenly, he began to think, “I can play this guy. I can play this level of violence.”

So, after trying his level best not to make the movie, Costner did a total 180 and agreed to make the movie. When he arrived in London to shoot alongside a powerhouse cast that also included Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones (his old muckers from the JFK days), he had long hair and a beard, but quickly began crafting a uniquely harsh and intimidating vision for the character of Jerico Stewart.

“I had to go into the make-up trailer and create that really severe look,” he explained of the decision to give him a skin fade with a tightly cropped buzz cut on top, which perfectly displayed the gruesome head wounds and surgical stitches that hint at his violent past, as well as the sci-fi surgery that gave him someone else’s memories. Once that was in place, Costner revealed, “Slowly but surely, Jericho came crawling out.” With a sly grin, he admitted, “I started feeling a little bit like Frankenstein.”

Ultimately, Costner’s performance wound up being easily the best goddamn part of the movie, which otherwise felt like one of those high-concept 1990s thrillers that couldn’t quite live up to its outlandish premise. Critics rejected it wholesale, and audiences didn’t react much better, with the film earning the dubious honour of being one of Costner’s worst opening weekends of all time. Perhaps turning down Criminal was the right way to go, after all – but hey, at least he had fun playing the villain for a change.

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