Kevin Costner Reveals He Was Sick, on Morphine Drip While Filming ‘Hidden Figures’

In a new PEOPLE cover interview, the Oscar winner and ‘Horizon’ director opens up about how he dealt with painful kidney stones during the 2016 movie shoot

Kevin Costner may have Academy Awards and accolades from his iconic 40-year Hollywood career, but there is one real-life performance that went unsung.

In 2016’s Hidden Figures, the true story of three brilliant Black women’s contributions to the Space Race in the 1960s, Costner pulled off the role of NASA bigwig Al Harrison — but it turns out he was sick during most of the shoot.

“I’ve 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],” says the Oscar winner, who is No. 1 on the list in PEOPLE’s annual 100 Reasons to Love America issue, in this week’s cover story.

Jim Parsons, Taraji P. Henson and Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures in 2016.

While filming, he developed kidney stones and says he “worked 10 days under an IV drip. I don’t even know how. About three days of it I was normal and then something happened to me.”

Costner, known for an unflappable work ethic, “never missed a day of work,” but says, “I sat in my trailer with a morphine drip in my arm.”

Kevin Costner at home in California on April 10, 2024.

Soon, the star had to keep his sleeves rolled down while shooting to hide the IV bruising. “Eventually I had to,” he recalls, acknowledging the experience was quite painful.

“I wanted to cry, but there was everybody watching, so I didn’t.”

Still, Costner, whose epic Western Horizon: An American Saga opens this weekend, also has fond memories of the shoot.

He loved re-teaming with Octavia Spencer, who he’d co-starred with in the 2014 drama, Black or White. Likewise, Costner gives Hidden Figures director Theodore Melfi props for being an ideal collaborator. He says: “It was magic.”

For more of Kevin Costner’s exclusive interview, pick up this week’s PEOPLE magazine, on stands now.