While reminiscing about working with the late Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner shared that CNN wanted his tribute to the singer to be short so that the network could air commercials during the live segment and he denied it.
While filming 1992’s The Bodyguard, Costner and Houston became close and remained great friends until her untimely death in February 2012. Fast forward to 2024, and Costner appeared as a guest on the June 3 episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Variety reported.
“I had been working on this speech…and I tried to compile everything I wanted to do and finally crafted this speech,” Costner told Shepard about being selected to speak in honor of Houston at her funeral. “Somebody said, ‘CNN’s here, they wouldn’t mind if your remarks were kept shorter because they’re going to have commercials.'” And I said, ‘They can get over that. They can play the commercial while I’m talking, I don’t care.'”
Despite having initial reservations about speaking at Houston’s funeral, he pushed through with the help of Houston’s cousin and Grammy-winning singer Dionne Warwick, who urged him to do so. Costner’s sentiments ended up being 17 minutes long.
“I could feel the weight on her, now it’s shifted to me,” Costner said about his time on stage. “What am I going to say about this little girl? [I] went back to that church in Newark and it was filled. It was electric. There were two bands playing, the church was alive. It was like, boom!”
When The Bodyguard hit theaters, it became the “second highest-grossing movie of 1992,” according to Variety. The now-iconic film raked in a whopping $411 million globally.
In addition, songs like “I Will Always Love You” and “I Have Nothing” spearheaded the movie’s accompanying soundtrack to be nominated for Album of the Year, which it won at the 1994 Grammys. The project still holds the record for the best-selling movie soundtrack of all time.
“I don’t think we’ll ever forget when that little song came out, that she just blew up,” Costner told Entertainment Weekly in a 2022 interview. “She sang the first part of it a cappella and musically the world was never the same. We have a moment of her in that movie we’ll never ever forget that and I think that when movies are working at their best, that’s what can happen.”
