True Detectives

In The Highwaymen, Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are the Texas Rangers charged with hunting down Bonnie and Clyde. Total Film talks to the leads and director John Lee Hancock to find out why the star-crossed outlaws still hold such an enduring and relevant fascination for moviegoers.

- Matt Maytum

The more honest the stories are, the better they become,” ponders Kevin Costner in that unmistakeable Californian drawl. “Sometimes the truth is more entertaining than the sensational lie.” It’s December 2018, and Costner is talking to TF about his latest film, The Highwaymen, which offers a fresh perspective on the Bonnie and Clyde story. Produced by Netflix, the film will get its world premiere at Austin’s South by Southwest festival in March.

The outlaw lovers – gunned down more than 80 years ago – continue to exert a powerful hold on the public imagination. “Just naturally, it does tend to happen that people get interested in the story, just like they did all those years ago,” considers Woody Harrelson, Costner’s co-star and bearer of a similarly unmistakeable, albeit Texan, drawl. “But I don’t know… I didn’t know this perspective on it.”

This, it soon becomes obvious, is an untold angle on an iconic piece of American history. While The Highwaymen always has Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in the crosshairs, it focuses on the stateline crossing manhunt from the perspective of the lawmen hired to bring them to justice: former Texas Rangers Frank Hamer (Costner) and Maney Gault (Harrelson). Hamer is offered the retirement interrupting gig after the FBI’s efforts to apprehend the couple come to naught; all the while the crime spree is attracting newspaper inches and a burgeoning fandom.