*Kevin Costner has revealed a secret about the iconic poster for 1992’s “The Bodyguard” starring the late-great Whitney Houston.
According to the Hollywood legend, the woman he’s holding in the poster is not the music superstar but rather her double.
The image for the poster depicts a scene from the film, which saw Costner’s character carrying singing sensation Rachel Marron (Houston) out of a nightclub after a riot broke out.
“That wasn’t even Whitney actually,” Costner tells Entertainment Weekly. “She had gone home and that was her double, and her head was buried into my shoulder, which was appropriate anyway. She was frightened.”
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The actor said it took some convincing to get the studio on board with a poster that didn’t feature Houston’s face.
“I picked that picture out because my friend Ben Glass took it…I sent it to Warner Bros and I go, ‘There’s the poster.’ Because it was so evocative. It wasn’t special photography; it wasn’t anything,” Costner said.
“And so they sent me like five mockups where they put her head [on it] where she’s looking [out],” he added. “I said ‘Guys, I think we had it the first time.’”
Kevin previously noted how he thought Whitney was “the perfect choice” for the role, despite her decline in terms of popularity at the time.
“That didn’t really matter to me. I just thought she was the perfect choice,” Costner told Yahoo Entertainment about the late pop icon. “It wasn’t her ‘in’ moment. … Everybody alerted me to the fact that she was black, which I knew. It might have been easier two years earlier at her peak. But after that movie, she became, I think, one of the biggest stars in the world.”
“The Bodyguard” turned out to be a massive success, grossing $411 million worldwide. As noted by Essence, Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the film’s soundtrack was the longest-running No. 1 single in history at the time, according to Billboard.
