As one of the most iconic examples of an actor who became a director, Clint Eastwood has run the full Hollywood gamut — at least the non-CGI spectacle sector — and has multitudes of experience before and behind the camera. He’s also a director known for wasting zero time, energy and film stock during production, which doesn’t freely allow for actors to have egos or on-set melodrama. And Kevin Costner apparently learned that lesson in a surprisingly simple, yet hilariously brutal, way in the early ‘90s.
While guesting on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, the filmmaker’s son Scott Eastwood shared an anecdote (that he admittedly said he might not get entirely accurate) about one particular day on the set of the 1993 crime drama A Perfect World. In the movie, Costner and Eastwood respectively played a convict and a Texas Ranger, and their movie-making ideologies reportedly clashed as much as their characters’ morals did, with Costner preferring to spend time honing performances, while his co-star/director famously dislikes rehearsals and extra takes.
The timing of when this anecdote would have taken place is unclear, but Scott Eastwood stated:
Kevin Costner, sort of going through maybe, you know, the Kevin Costner rise to fame and maybe got a big ego, blah blah blah. But they were doing Perfect World ... and apparently Kevin wouldn't come out of his trailer for some reason. And my dad doesn't do trailers and things. He's like, 'Just be on set, stay on [set].' He always told me too as a kid, 'You want to learn how to make movies? You want to learn how to do this, you stay here with everybody else and you make the damn movies.'
To his point, Kevin Costner was having the hottest of hot streaks, with smash-hits in every year from 1987's The Untouchables to 1992's The Bodyguard, with Dances with Wolves and Field of Dreams also in that run. Not that I'd ever defend anyone having a huge ego, but if there was ever a time for it to be applicable... In any case, Eastwood continued:
So [Clint] just said, 'We'll send him home then,' and everyone said, 'What do you mean? He's in the scene.' He said, 'Eh, send him home. 'So he sent him home, and I guess they just went to Kevin and said, 'Hey, you're going to go home for the day. You don't need to be here.' He said, 'What do you mean? I'm in the scene.' And they went, 'Well, I guess you're not anymore. Clint changed that.'
After all the drama on Mobland regarding Tom Hardy's alleged behavior on the set and refusal to leave his trailer, it'd be a very fun Sliding Doors situation to see what that actor-director combo would amount to, assuming it lasted longer than a couple of days.
Eastwood wrapped his tale, saying:
So you know that's the pecking order. And so I think the next day [Costner] was on set, ready to go.
It's unclear if this story is different from one told by Clint Eastwood's go-to cinematographer Jack Green, or if it dovetails with it, but Green shared with Esquire some years back that on a day when Costner wasn't ready to come out of his trailer on time, the director instructed his team to find Costner's stand-in extra and to get him costumed for the scene. Costner allegedly discovered this when he later arrived on set and learned the scene was already shot, and yelled at Eastwood about it.
Whatever the case, cooler heads did eventually prevail, without further stories of on-set hostility. While perhaps not immediately near the top of either of their filmographies, A Perfect World is pretty solid, and has held up better than some of Costner's big-screen efforts that were produced in subsequent years, such as Wyatt Earp and Waterworld. (Not everyone has distaste for Waterworld here at CinemaBlend.)
For better or worse, Clint Eastwood is no longer making movies, despite saying in 2025 that he wasn't planning on stopping his filmmaking journey. But as a silver lining, A Perfect World is available to stream for free on YouTube right now.
