Kevin Costner reveals he had kidney stones, was on morphine filming ‘Hidden Figures’
Kevin Costner had a painful experience on the set of “Hidden Figures.”
The Oscar winner, 69, revealed in a new interview that he was on a morphine drip after he developed kidney stones while filming the 2016 drama film.
“Ive never worked drunk on a set. I’ve never worked high on a set, but I was on morphine the last two weeks that I worked on [‘Hidden Figures’],” he recalled to PEOPLE.
“I had kidney stones, and I worked 10 days under an [IV] drip. I don’t even know how,” he added.
Costner explained that he was shooting the movie for just three days when he got sick.
“I didn’t miss a day at work. I’ve never missed a day at work. And then when I thought I was going to be off [the morphine], a second kidney stone came, which I never had, and I was right back on it,” he said. “So I sat in my trailer with a morphine drip in my arm.”
“I eventually had to have my sleeves down in the movie as opposed to rolled up because of that,” added Costner, who played Al Harrison, director of the Space Task Group (STG), in the film.
“I wanted to cry, but there was everybody watching, so I didn’t,” he said.
Directed by Ted Melfi, “Hidden Figures” is about three Black female mathematicians (played by Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe) who work at NASA during the Space Race.
Costner, Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons play NASA employees.
Mahershala Ali, Glen Powell, Aldis Hodge, Kimberly Quinn, Olek Krupa and Saniyya Sidney also star.
The movie made over $236 million at the worldwide box office and was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture.
“It was magic,” Costner told PEOPLE about the movie.
In 2016, Costner revealed that he helped shape his “Hidden Figures” character by talking to the director and convincing him to make some tweaks to the script.
“When you know a character really well, sometimes you know just by looking at them what they’re thinking,” Costner told Vulture. “And we understood that my character needed to have what you might call a real or vague form of racism, which is that he wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t paying enough attention in the workplace to know that this was even a problem.”
He continued: “I work around a lot of scientists and engineers because I invest in those kinds of companies. That group of people who are trying to develop something from a technical standpoint, they just want to work, and politics can be the thing that screws them up the most. They’re not equipped for it, they’re a different breed of cat. I was able to bring that sort of stuff to Ted.”
