Kevin Costner has opened up about Whitney Houston’s funeral, and explained why he refused to cut her eulogy short.
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The pair appeared together in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard, in which Costner played the bodyguard and love interest of Houston’s character.
Costner spoke at the ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ singer’s funeral following her death by drowning in 2012.
The Waterworld star shared more details on his speech, which eventually ran to 17 minutes, during a recent episode of the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepherd. He also explained how he disregarded advice to shorten the eulogy he’d written.
“I had been working on this speech… and I tried to compile everything I wanted to do and finally crafted this speech,” Costner explained.
Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner on April 5, 2008 in Scottsdale, Arizona. CREDIT: Getty/Photo by Michael Caulfield/WireImage
He continued: “Somebody said, ‘CNN’s here, they wouldn’t mind if your remarks were kept shorter because they’re going to have commercials.’ And I said, ‘They can get over that. They can play the commercial while I’m talking, I don’t care.’”
Costner also shared about his initial hesitancy to speak at the singer’s funeral, before he was encouraged by Houston’s cousin and music legend, Dionne Warwick.
“I could feel the weight on her, now it’s shifted to me,” Costner explained. “What am I going to say about this little girl? [I] went back to that church in Newark and it was filled. It was electric. There were two bands playing, the church was alive. It was like, boom!”
At the SAG Awards in February 2022, Costner spoke about Houston’s hit cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ and its feature in The Bodyguard.
“I don’t think we’ll ever forget when that little song came out, that she just blew up,” he explained. “She sang the first part of it a cappella and musically the world was never the same.”
He added: “We have a moment of her in that movie we’ll never ever forget that and I think that when movies are working at their best, that’s what can happen.”
In other news, last month, Costner opened up about his decision to leave Paramount series Yellowstone.
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