Kevin Costner still lights up when he talks about Dolly Parton. In an interview with Men’s Journal, reported by Whiskey Riff on Nov. 9, the 71-year-old actor looked back on the song that tied the two of them together.
The song is “I Will Always Love You.” Dolly wrote it and first released it in 1974. Eighteen years later, Kevin was making “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 movie where he plays a former Secret Service agent hired to protect a pop star, played by Whitney Houston. He believed Dolly’s song was the one Whitney should sing.
Whitney wasn’t so sure at first. “I don’t know, this little country song, Kev,” he remembered her telling him.
Kevin also wanted Whitney to start the song with no music behind her. He told Kelly Clarkson in 2024 that the record side “weren’t that wild about it,” and his answer was simple. “You guys need to get over that,” he said. His idea was to “let her stand up there just bare.” In this clip from her show, he tells the whole story.
Kevin Costner tells Kelly Clarkson why he fought for that quiet opening
He won that fight, and the whole world heard the result. Whitney’s version went platinum 18 times and won Record of the Year at the 1994 Grammys. Dolly had kept the rights to the song she wrote, so she shared in that success too.
Kevin told Men’s Journal he doesn’t remember a thank-you from Whitney for the idea. “I don’t recall Whitney thanking me for the song idea,” he said. Dolly was another matter.
“Dolly did take a moment. We ran into each other, and it was a very unique moment,” Kevin said. He kept the details to himself. “I cannot begin to even tell you what we said to each other, but it was classic,” he added. “It was warm. It was typical Dolly, and it was really hilariously funny.”
Dolly, who passed away on Aug. 25, told her own story about running into Kevin. She shared it in her 2025 book, “Star of the Show: My Life on Stage,” as quoted by The Independent and People. She didn’t say whether it was the same meeting Kevin remembers, so it is best read as her side of a separate moment.
She was at a conference at the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza hotel in Nashville, walking with Bryan Seaver, who was then in his first few years as her bodyguard. “We were walking down a hallway when the door to one of the rooms opened,” she wrote. A man with “scruffy facial hair and blue jeans” stepped out. He “took one look at me,” Dolly wrote, and he “rushed my way!”
Bryan didn’t wait to find out who the man was. He “jumped in his path” and “pushed him up against the wall,” Dolly wrote, and he held him there.
Then she got a good look at the stranger. “I started laughing. ‘Bryan, let him go! That’s Kevin Costner!'”
Bryan got the last word, and it was a good one. “‘You should know better,’ Bryan told him. ‘You’re the bodyguard.'”
For the man who played the most famous bodyguard in the movies, it was quite a Nashville welcome. Dolly clearly loved telling it.
She also loved what Whitney did with her song. In this clip from The Graham Norton Show, Dolly talks about how Whitney’s version blew her away.
Dolly Parton talks about hearing Whitney Houston sing her song
Kevin still won’t say exactly what Dolly told him the day she thanked him. He only calls it warm and classic, which sounds a lot like the Dolly that fans knew for more than 60 years.