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The Bodyguard star Kevin Costner said it ‘got ugly’ with the Royal Family after news broke that Princess Diana was set to star in The Bodyguard sequel.
The Hollywood star, 69, starred opposite Whitney Houston in the beloved 1992 thriller-romance where ex-Secret Service agent Frank (Kevin) is hired as the bodyguard for R&B singer Rachel (Whitney).
The film was a huge success, going down in rom-com history and it earned a whopping $411million (£323million) at the global box office.
But the Yellowstone star intended to release a sequel featuring one of the best-known faces in the world – Princess Diana. Sadly, after her sudden death in a car crash in 1997, the film ground to a halt but not without plenty of drama.
Talks started between the actor and Princess shortly before her death after the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson (recently divorced from Prince Andrew), put the two in touch, as Kevin explained.
‘When Diana passed, about a year later it leaked out that I had been prepping Bodyguard 2 with her. And what happened was, that the Royal Family kind of turned on me a little bit.
After a successful first film, Kevin was ready to create a sequel featuring Princess Diana (Picture: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
Diana, Princess of Wales, was into the idea, according to Kevin (Picture: Getty)
‘Like, “No, that’s not true.” And it got actually kind of ugly. And I let it go for a while. It just got uglier and uglier,’ he said on The Howard Stern Show, although he didn’t specify which members of the family were targeting him.
Eventually, the Oscar winner was driven to contact the Duchess of York again.
‘I said, “Sarah, you need to tell me who is leading the charge there on this thing. 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.’
The actor explained how when he first contacted Diana, he told her he wanted to ‘build’ the film around her and queried her interest.
This would have been around the time the Princess of Wales had finalised her divorce from Prince Charles (now King Charles) in August 1996.
The award-winning actor told the whole tale on the Howard Stern Show (Picture: Getty)
Sarah Ferguson first connected Kevin and Diana (Picture: Getty)
Kevin continued: ‘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.’
The estranged Royal Family member even had her own requests for what she wanted to include in the sequel, including a kissing scene.
He added: ‘She was very sweet and we talked. The second time we talked she said, “Is there going to be a kissing scene?”. I said, “Do you want there to be one?”
‘She said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Then we’ll do that.” I wasn’t going to make the full romance about her, it was going to be about this Asian woman. But there was going to be a moment that we did. And she was so sweet about this.’
Once talks had progressed he promised to send her the movie and make it so she ‘didn’t have to do all that much’. After Diana died, Kevin decided not to go ahead with the sequel because he ‘could not replace Princess Di’.
Diana was estranged from the Royal Family by this time after her divorce from Prince Charles (Picture: PA)
She wanted to include a kissing scene (Picture: Getty)
The never-to-be plot would have followed Frank as he went to Hong Kong for a horse race. While his character was on the plane ‘Princess Di is up front’ and ‘everybody has to wait for her to get off the plane’.
Frank and the Princess meet again at a party the next day when she thinks he has been assigned to watch over her, and their dynamic progresses from there.
Although the film was never made, Kevin never forgot his connection with Diana thanks to her son, Prince William.
He concluded: ‘About 12 years later I’m in Scotland and [William and I] meet in a room. There’s nobody in the room. Something drove him, he wanted to meet me.
‘I sat across from him and he looked at me and he said, “My mom fancied you.” It was the sweetest, gentlest thing.
Prince William met with Kevin years later to talk about his late mum (Picture: Wirelmage)
‘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.”‘
In recent years, the screen star is best known for playing Montana landowner John Dutton in US drama series Yellowstone.
He shockingly left the show in 2023, to the disappointment of fans and the showrunner Taylor Sheridan.
He opened up about his decision to leave after production schedules kept on getting pushed back.
‘I did it for five years, and I wanted to work more than once a year,’ Costner told the Today Show earlier this month.
‘We lost an entire year at one point, and I thought, that can’t happen again. It was well over a year. I thought I have to be in a position to make the things.
‘Material has to be ready at certain times, and we weren’t able to do that. After five years, I thought, I’m not going to do this. If we can get that, we can do that, and I’ll do it.’
He added that he would reprise his role in the ‘right circumstances’.
Metro.co.uk has reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment.
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