Actor Kevin Costner learned the hard way that you didn't want to take on the royal family in the 1990s. As the story goes, Kevin had formed a friendship with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York (who was married to Prince Andrew), and through that friendship, he met Princess Diana. In 2012, Kevin shared that he had conceived an idea for a sequel to his hit movie The Bodyguard, but instead of bringing back original costar Whitney Houston, he wanted to build the story around Princess Diana. Unfortunately, the movie never made it past the development stage, but according to Kevin, the royals wanted to pretend like the whole thing never happened.
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Kevin wanted to turn Princess Diana into a movie star.
During an interview on The Howard Stern Show this week, Kevin revealed that he ended up having a feud with the royal family after Diana’s death because they couldn’t believe she would ever want to star in a big Hollywood film. But Kevin knew the truth, and he wasn’t going to let them pretend that she didn’t want to be in the film.
The royals tried to create their own version of history.
“When Diana passed, about a year later it had leaked out that I was prepping Bodyguard 2 with her. And what happened was, the royal family kind of turned on me a little bit,” he explained.
“Like, ‘No, that’s not true.’ And it got actually kind of ugly,” he said on the podcast. “And I let it go for a while. It just got uglier and uglier.”
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Kevin reached out to Sarah Ferguson for help.
“Finally I called up Sarah, and said, ‘Sarah, you need to tell me who is leading the charge there on this thing,” Kevin recalled. “She goes, ‘No, no, no, Kev, you don’t want to talk to them.’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ I called them up and I said, ‘I’m telling you something, you need to stop because it is true. And if you don’t stop, I’m gonna start. Because it was.'”
Apparently, Princess Diana was seriously interested in making the movie.
Kevin explained that when he approached Diana about the project, she was already separated from the then-Prince Charles and on the outs with the royal family, especially Queen Elizabeth. The film’s plot would revolve on Diana’s complicated relationship with the paparazzi.
“What had happened was, I started talking to her through Sarah, and I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna do ‘Bodyguard 2′ and I think I can build this around you. Would you be interested?’” he remembered. “And she goes, ‘Yes. My life’s about to change.’ I didn’t really go into depth with it, but I thought I understood what she was saying.”
Prince William also plays a part in the story.
When Diana died in a car crash caused by a paparazzi chase in 1997, the movie was scrapped. “I could not replace Princess Di,” Kevin said.
He also revealed that years after her death, he met with William in Scotland.
“We meet in a room. There’s nobody in the room. I sat across from him and he looked at me and he said, ‘My mom fancied you,’” Kevin said. “It was the sweetest, gentlest thing. He believed the story, and believe it or not after the talk with the royal family, about two years later the butler came out and said, ‘Yeah, that was the true what Kevin was saying, that she [Diana] was gonna do it.'”
