Kevin Costner has revealed Princess Diana once harbored a crush on him.
Costner, 69, said during an interview with People, published on Tuesday, June 18, that Prince William spilled the beans to him during a secret meeting about “15 years” after Costner’s film, The Bodyguard, was released in 1992.
“I was going to make a second one of [The] Bodyguard … Diana and I began to talk,” the Yellowstone actor, who had planned to cast Diana in a sequel to the film, told the outlet.
Costner added that he “ultimately had a very sweet conversation with Prince William,” who said, ‘You know my mom kind of fancied you?’”
Costner detailed that William, 41, called the meeting while Costner was in England and the pair spoke for about half an hour, with “nobody else” in the room. “I got this message that the prince would love to talk, and I said, ‘What? ‘… and then I went, ‘OK.'”
While Costner’s lips are sealed over the meeting’s agenda, the memory of their private exchange has never left him. “I’ll never say what we talked about but it was a very sweet thing,” Costner said. “I’ve had such fond memories of who he [William] was … and what we talked about.”
Costner, who stars in Horizon: An American Saga, which is set for release on Friday, June 28, revealed in 2019 that Diana was interested in starring in a sequel to The Bodyguard, which originally featured Whitney Houston.
In the new interview, Costner detailed Diana’s brief involvement in the project, revealing that it was yet another member of the royal family who put the project on Diana’s radar.
“Sarah [Ferguson] was the one who set this up,” Costner said. “Sarah was very cool, when she could’ve been going, ‘Well, I’m a princess, what about me,’ she didn’t. She never inserted herself and Diana and I began to talk.”
Costner told Entertainment Tonight in 2019 that Diana, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997, came very close to working alongside him.
“The studio liked the idea of doing a Bodyguard 2 [with Princess Diana] in the same kind of capacity as Whitney,” Costner said. “I just remember her [Diana] being incredibly sweet on the phone when she asked the questions. She goes, ‘Are we going to have like a kissing scene?’ But she said it in a very respectful — she was a little nervous because I think her life was very governed.”
In a 2019 interview with People, Costner said he “received the script for the sequel in August 1997,” just one day prior to Diana’s death.
Costner recently said he has fond memories of his original Bodyguard costar, Houston, who died at the age of 48 in 2012.
“I loved her — it’s not like this giant mystery — so I knew that she should be the one,” he said of casting Houston in the lead role during the June 3 episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast.
