Kevin Costner recalls painful diagnosis that left him filming award-winning movie on morphine

Kevin Costner has recalled the time he was forced to shoot the 2015 film Hidden Figures for 10 days on an IV drip as he was suffering from kidney stones. 

“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,” the 69-year-old has now shared. “I had kidney stones and I 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.” 

Speaking about his time filming the award-winning movie with Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monae, he told People that he had never missed a day of work in his life and that he thought he was clear until a second kidney stone appeared. 

“I sat in my trailer with a morphine drip in my arm that I eventually had to have my sleeves down in the movie because of that,” he said, adding that he refused to cry because “everybody was watching”. 

Hidden Figures was nominated for three Oscars, and won a SAG Awards for ensemble and three NAACP awards. It told the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three black women who worked for NASA on astronaut John Glenn’s journey to space in the 1950s. 

Kevin’s character was loosely based on Robert C. Gilruth, the first director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

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The Yellowstone actor is now starring in his passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, which also stars his son Hayes, admitting he “selfishly” cast his son in order to gain more one-on-one time with him. 

But Hayes was fine with that, and on the red carpet, he told Entertainment Tonight that he thought the experience “really cool, it was an amazing experience”. 

He added: “I was just really proud of my dad, he’s been working for so long, and I just could only think about him at that moment.” 

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Hayes is Kevin and ex-wife Christine Baumgartner’s middle son; they are also parents to Cayden, 17, and Grace, 14. He is also a dad to Annie, 40, Lily, 37, and Joe, 36, whom he shares with Cindy Silva. Cindy and Kevin wed in 1978 and divorced in 1994. 

Kevin is also dad to son Liam, 26, with former partner Bridget Rooney.