SOMETIMES KEVIN COSTNER imagines that he's watching himself in a film about Kevin Costner. He pictures himself in a theater; it's dark and he's gazing at himself in the same way we have over the years, rooting for him to succeed. In times of embattlement or stress, he says, "I've got to be my own movie." In Westerns, Costner's preferred genre, the hero tends to ride in, outmatched and outgunned, only to come away victorious. This often seems to be the way Costner sees himself too. Famously, Costner's first big break as an actor was being cast in 1983's The Big Chill; then, after shooting, all his scenes were cut. Before he was dropped from the film, "I had all my friends going, 'Kevin, you're in that movie. You should do press. You should ride this wave," he told me. "And I said, 'No. It'll be a more interesting story once I do what I know I'm going to do.""
Costner is a lifetime devotee of the hard way. When Ron Shelton cast the actor in 1988's Bull Durham, he tried to hand Costner the part, only for Costner to insist on auditioning anyway. "So we went from having lunch to the batting cage on Sepulveda with a bunch of quarters," Shelton told me. "And we're putting quarters in there and he's hitting line drives right-handed and lefthanded, and we're playing catch in the parking lot. Girls are walking by him. They don't know who he is. Three months later, they're going to know who he is."
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