Kevin Costner Reveals How He Handled the 'Storm' Last Summer Amid Christine Baumgartner Divorce

Last summer, Kevin Costner couldn’t stay away from the headlines. If it wasn’t his battle with producers over his participation in Yellowstone , then it was his contentious divorce from Christine Baumgartner. With part one of his Horizon: An American Saga franchise about to premiere, the 69-year-old actor is revealing just how difficult that time in his life truly was.

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The personal and professional controversies were a lot to take in, Costner described as a “storm.” “If you’re in a storm and you’re the only one up on deck holding the wheel, and you’re just trying to get the rain and saltwater out of your eyes, you couldn’t let go of the wheel,” he explained to People. “I just haven’t been able to let go of the wheel.” At the time, “so many things were in motion,” including the $38 million of his own money that he’s risking on the first two parts of Horizon.

“I had this money out there, these movies were committed, 300 or 400 people working on it,” he said of his passion project. “The gamble is ignoring my heart and ignoring it whispering to me.” He truly believes that audiences, particularly Yellowstone fans , will show up at the box office and make his vision a huge hit. Costner knows that he has a lot riding on this film because there have been so many doubters telling him Horizon will fail.

“I was going to build my last house,” he explained to director Francis Ford Coppola in an interview for Deadline . “But I did it without a thought. It has thrown my accountant into a f**king conniption fit . But it’s my life, and I believe in the idea and the story.” Costner is putting his $145 million California estate at risk, but he thinks it’s worth it. The pressure also has his close pals worried about his well-being.

“You could see how ‘shell-shocked’ Kevin has been after the last year and a half where he got divorced, fought publicly with the Yellowstone bosses, and had to make these two Horizon movies with his own money before he could convince anybody to release them,” a source told Life & Style . The conclusion to this story will be written in the next week when Horizon is released in theaters on June 28, but Costner isn’t losing any hope. “What I can say is I’ve had an amazing life,” he told People. “I’ve been bruised, but I’ve had an amazing life and I’m grateful for that.”

Before you go, click here to see the longest celebrity divorces that took years to get finalized.