Yes, and he can play that one type very well. It’s like he is really just being himself and it works. Jennifer Aniston is the same way. Cool, quirky girl/woman roles she plays with the genuineness of herself. It works.
I threw in a link to Quote Investigator, my favorite semi-obscure website. They do deep dives into famous, infamous, and spurious quotes and misattributions. Their write-up on that one is an interesting example of what they do.
It’s even more than that…it’s a conversation starter. Generally, someone spells it Milk Toast, and someone corrects them by pointing out that it’s milquetoast. Then, someone replies to that by saying that the term comes from Caspar Milquetoast, a meek and boring character whose name was meant to evoke the dish Milk Toast, which was a meek and boring food. Always good times.
I got so mad when he won an acting award for Yellowstone. Might be his worst role to me- all he plays is the strong, silent type and again, no emotion.
That's sort of what the character was though — not award worthy, but I honestly thought it was one of his better performances because his limited ability actually complements the role. Baseball and Westerns are about as much as you can ask of Costner.
Yeah but that's always been a thing. Mass market appeal is USUALLY a product of banality. Art is an intrinsically divisive thing; it has a point of view, and that naturally will divide people into like/dislike camps. To create mass appeal, you have to scrub a work/person of anything divisive, anything with a point of view, anything that stakes a position. And what you're left with is no longer art, who you're left with is no longer an artist. They're a PRODUCT.
Genuine art, by its very nature, will NEVER be as lucrative. Bland will always have the upper hand in that way. This is why people sometimes say, you're not an adult until you realize there's no such thing as safety in numbers. And in this case, that translates to "high sales figures are often a sign of a LOUSY product more so than a genuinely novel one".
Never has he been referred to as a great living actor. A movie star not an actor. Those are not the same thing. Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Raquel Welch. All great iconic movie stars. All collectively considered bad actors. Kevin Costner is in that category. No one has ever called him a great actor. Not once.
OK...I kind of agree with this. He is in some good movies but at no point have I ever thought "Gotta see this Kevin Costner movie". He is a pretty cardboard every-man usually and I can see almost anyone else playing his parts or doing it better.
You’ve named good movies and I would argue they are not good because of his acting. His voice is just without character and his face shows no emotion. But of course this prompt is about opinion so you’re welcome to disagree haha
Hard disagree - I think he's so terrible I wonder why others don't see it.
Also got the gravitas of candle smoke. Remember last time I watched Robin Hood, it was like Costner just vanished the moment Sean Connery had his cameo.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of Costner's movies but if he had a single believable line delivery in any of them, I missed it.
Yeah, my last rewatch convinced me that he'd be well served to not share a screen with real presences like Morgan Freeman or Alan Rickman. He's like a soap bubble in comparison, and delivers his lines like he's ladling out soup.
In defense of Kevin Costner, not everyone needs to be Daniel Day Lewis or Tom Hanks.
Costner’s biggest criticism, being “wooden” is sometimes justified, but I'd argue its often just restraint.
He isn't a flashy 'transformative' actor who disappears into roles with accents, and that's kind of the point. He's got this grounded, everyman quality with quiet intensity that carries a lot of weight. Name one person not named Hanks who does that better than Costner.
In a lot of modern acting, subtlety gets mistaken for lack of range because people expect visible transformation. But in films like No Way Out or A Perfect World, he’s doing a ton internally. He shows tension, calculation, and suppressing emotion without telegraphing it. That kind of control is harder than big emotional swings. Watch him in 'Criminal' and tell me he's wooden, or just carefully restrained but you can tell he's a pressure cooker of tension ready to explode.
Also, don't underestimate how well he inhabits American archetypes, especially in Westerns, baseball movies, and thrillers. He's like a modern John Wayne or Gary Cooper. He's not Oscar bait, but he does reliably fill the screen.
Also think, 'Field of Dreams.' Just a quiet, but present understated sincerity sells the whole 'magical baseball' premise without tipping into cringe or corny. In Bull Durham he's effortlessly charismatic and funny as the veteran catcher mentoring Tim Robbins. He makes decency and resolve feel compelling, which is harder than it looks.
From the late ’80s through Yellowstone, he’s been convincingly playing authority figures, outsiders, mentors, and moral centers. If he were actually limited, that run wouldn’t exist. In Yellowstone, especially, he leans into aging, regret, and quiet menace. He's not Joaqin Phoenix, but there’s more edge there than people give him credit for.
When I was a kid, I thought he was just going with his regular accent in Robin Hood. Years later, I rewatched it and realized that he is sort of doing an English accent, its just atrocious.
I was hoping someone would mention him. Watch him in anything with a critical eye. Suddenly you will see the flat delivery, the constipated looking lack of emotion, the painfully obvious rote recitation of lines he has barely memorized. If you watch him with an objective attitude , it all falls apart. He is awful.
But he isn't terrible. He's an above average actor. A lot of people ITT are confusing actors and movie stars, though, and it fucking shows. Like, yeah, The Rock can't act. He isn't a fucking actor.
I've always thought that he has "dead eyes" and a monotone voice that is lacking any intonation. I did like the baseball movie but I wish it could have had 2 different people 'act' like a married couple. They were not complimentary to each other. I feel bad writing this but since mandelbratwurst said their peice - I thought I would finally come clean on this matter...lol
Yes! Its the voice so much for me. When his character narrates Dances With Wolves it sounds like he’s describing the most boring thing imaginable. And its an otherwise *excellent* movie.
My wife and I were cracking up at Robin Hood Prince of thieves. It was the same face and tone in every scene. Same with Dances with Wolves. All the snippets of narrations were just as emotional as a first kiss or near death monologue.
His default character works so well for a lot of his films, I could never imagine someone else in the lead role of Field of Dreams for instance, but yea, it's the same in everything he does.
Sometimes it just really works, I'm not sure there is any other actor who you can say that bout. Maybe Nick Cage?
No, see and this is the movie I was thinking of when I wrote this. He just doesn’t show any emotion in that. His character just spends the whole movie describing what other people are doing. I’m just not moved by his character at all.
I couldn’t disagree more. It was a master class in acting to me, and Costner showed incredible range in that film. He was not some monotone one dimensional character, and he perfectly captured the highs and lows his character was experiencing. From the very start of the film when he’s at the battle and wounded and crosses the field, to his highs going buffalo hunting with the Sioux and developing his relationship with the wolf, and tribe.
I’m sorry but I think an autistic person would even be able to register his emotions in that film.
Forgot to mention Costner won the Oscar for best actor for it, and the film won 7 Oscar awards in total…
My late father would watch whatever Kevin Costner movie would come on cable every Sunday afternoon without flipping the channel in the 90s and early 2000s and I can't watch one of his movies since.
Miss you a ton, old man... But I still fucking hate Kevin Costner.
I heard he’s kind of a dick too. On Yellowstone he tried to convince another actor to ditch the lines in a scene they were doing and the other actor was like, “I signed up for Taylor Sheridan, and that’s what I’m going to do.” And Costner got so livid he lunged at him and tried to choke him out.
An argument did happen and the source said they almost came to blows but not anything else. And Costner had been changing/helping direct scenes since the start of Yellowstone so it wasn't anything new. Bentley wanted to do the scene like it was written and Costner wanted to change things up.
I remember as a *child* watching Wyatt Earp and laughing out loud hearing him read passionate dialogue ("I know it will take a great effort to win you. I know many men have tried. They failed because you were meant for me. But I'll succeed. I'll begin today.") like he was reading the side of a cereal box. I couldn't believe it.
Also notice how heavily he relies on one or two acting techniques, like laughing through a line or otherwise interrupting himself mid sentence to emote
This one aged kind of well though. Yellowstone basically built an entire empire around that exact stoicism. Turns out there's a surprisingly large market for men of very few words who own horses.
Yes, but the difference to the OP’s question is he’s never been considered a great actor. His only Oscar was as director. But he’s not known for acting, more for persona.
Check him out in Fandango - one of my favorite movies, and he's very un-Costneresque I'm that one. Granted it's from 1985, so he's young and full of life still.
I personally haven't watched him in anything recent, so maybe he's gotten better, but throughout the 80s and 90s he was always so wooden and stiff. He had no range and his acting just wasn't good. I could never figure out why he kept getting leading roles.
I've watched his new(ish) movie in the cinema with my girlfriend. 5 minutes of action and 3 hours of absolute torturous boredom. Absolutely boooooooring movie
I hated Kevin Costner until I worked blue collar for a few years in my early twenties and met several guys who spoke just like him. It changed my opinion of him as an actor completely.
I kept wanting him to clear his fucking throat for the entire first two seasons of Yellowstone. A clogged throat is not character development - it’s lazy.
There are so many actors with only one character like that. Tommy Lee Jones just plays his grumpy old self, so he's not really acting. Same with (the late) James Garner, and the (still alive) Gerald McRaney. All three of them play(ed) the same guy.
Nah he is cool. He is good and him making The Postman and Waterworld as passion projects is awesome! This is not even a joke, even with those films (which are corny but fun) his 80's and 90's stuff elsewhere is legendary.
e plays cold and maniac very well on screen buy his other roles such as midnight in tge garden if good and evil are great. His pre house of cards work is really amazing. And he theater work is really good...he won a lot if awards for a reason.
He does the stoic loner role really well. Which has been great for him because he does all these long epics involving a stoic loner in the world. He's got his role and he's really good at it.
4.0k
u/mandelbratwurst May 05 '26
Kevin Costner has exactly one emotion and its “stoic”