"The best actor I've ever worked with": Kevin Costner places this star above Eastwood, Sean Connery and De Niro

When it comes to determining who is the best actor in his eyes, Kevin Costner doesn't beat around the bush and chooses Gene Hackman, with whom he has worked twice. And for good reason!

Kevin Costner has worked with the greatest during his rich career, but there is one actor who has really left his mark on him, and whom he considers to be “the best” he has ever worked with, as he confided a few years ago to the microphone of Rich Eisen Show (via Espinof).

Kevin Costner Already Knows What He Wants (and Doesn't Want)

The anecdote takes place one day in 1986, on the set of One Way. Kevin Costner has difficulty working with director Roger Donaldson. It is necessary to shoot scenes around an office between his character and another. Costner, who already has the eye of the future director that he will be, wants the camera to be placed in one place, and Donaldson in another.

On the set, no one decides, and even less so the actor who is to play the scene with Costner, a certain Gene Hackman, who doesn't miss a thing but doesn't intervene.

Costner finally decides and it is his camera angle that is kept – the scene is also shot this way in the film – and when we ask him how Hackman is going to adapt, he answers: “Gene will figure out how to do it, because he's very good.”. And the filming resumes, but Kevin is not at the end of his emotions.

Validation of a giant

At the end of the day, Costner is about to get in his car and go home when Hackman signals him to come closer. The young actor fears that his elder will reproach him for forcing the director's hand, but it is quite the opposite that will happen. Hackman tells him:

I just got divorced, I've been in a lot of questionable movies recently, and when I saw you fighting for what you wanted today, it reminded me of how I felt when I was acting. What you did was good.

Then Hackman got into his car and drove off. A nice compliment and a nice mutual encounter since after One Way, the two actors would meet again on the set of the western Wyatt Earp: Costner in the title role, and Hackman in that of his father Nicholas Earp.