Kevin Costner Talks Whitney Houston, Addresses Rumors That He’s Dating Jewel

Kevin Costner has poured cold water all over those rumors of a romance with Jewel.

The Yellowstone star stopped by SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday (June 18) to promote his new movie Horizon: An American Saga – and break his silence on that dating chatter. He’s not hooked up, not in in love right now. “Jewel and I are friends. We’ve never gone out,” he tells Stern. “She’s special, and I don’t want these rumors to ruin our friendship because that’s what we have.”

The pair apparently bonded when they were hosted on Necker Island, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson’s private hideaway. “I got on a plane with nine people — Jewel was one of them,” he explains. “She was somebody I just had some tremendous conversations with.”

The gossip columns took notice when the singer, 49, and actor, 69, appeared together at a tennis fundraiser last December in the British Virgin Islands. Later, in April, Elle magazine published an interview in which Jewel gave her own response on the two-time Oscar winner, declaring him “a great person,” adding, “the public fascination is intense for sure.” And that was all.

Costner enjoyed a hot streak in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as the lead in The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves and The Bodyguard, where he played the titular character alongside the late superstar artist Whitney Houston.

Conversation moved on to Houston, who, by making her silver screen debut as Rachel Marron and landing a massive, global hit with the film’s soundtrack, become one of the biggest stars of them all.

“It could have been Michelle Pfeiffer, it could have been Julia Roberts,” remarks Costner, “but when I looked at it, I thought, ‘No, it should be Whitney Houston’”. He recounts, “for me, it was so easy to go, ‘Well this is the most beautiful girl, this is the one who can sing … this is the girl.’”

Houston, whose life and premature death in 2012 at the age of 48 is retold in the 2018 documentary Whitney, was initially out of her comfort zone in The Bodyguard.

She “didn’t really know how to do [her character’s first] line and I said, ‘We have to find the acid in you … the kind of diva moment in you,’” Costner explains. “I said, ‘If you’re uncertain about things, Whitney, just look at me and tell me and we will drift off into the corner and I’ll make this right for you.’”

It was Costner’s idea for Houston to kick off her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” a cappella, he reckons. “If she’s going to sing a song, the way she can really show that she really loved me was she would do it without a single note and that would prove how brave she is,’” he claims.

And in a bolt from the blue, Costner confirmed he had planned on making a sequel to The Bodyguard, with Princess Diana in a co-starring role. “She was very sweet,” Costner says of the late member of royalty, who died 1997, aged 36. “I never made that movie because I could not replace Princess Di,” he says. Was a kissing scene written into the script? “I wasn’t going to make the full romance about her,” he admits, “but there was going to be a moment.”

Costner returns to the wild west for chapter one of Horizon, due out June 28, for which he stars and directs. Ahead of release, Costner dropped a different kind of project – “Mountainside Mocha Latte,” a coffee collaboration with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.