Kevin Costner Needed Morphine Drip While Filming ‘Hidden Figures’: ‘I Wanted to Cry’

Kevin Costner secretly battled kidney stones while filming 2016’s Hidden Figures.

“I've never worked drunk on a set. I've never worked high on a set, but I was on morphine the last two weeks that I worked,” Costner, 69, recalled to People in an interview published on Saturday, June 29. “I had kidney stones and I worked 10 days under an IV drip. I don't even know how. About three days of it, I was normal and then something happened to me.”

Despite feeling under the weather, Costner refused to “miss a day of work.”

“I’ve never missed a day of work [in my entire career] and then when I thought I was gonna be off [the IV drip], a second kidney stone came — which I never had — and I was right back on it,” he recalled to the outlet. “I sat in my trailer with a morphine drip in my arm that I eventually had to have my sleeves down in the movie because of that.”

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He continued, “I wanted to cry, but there was everybody watching, so I didn’t.”

Costner portrayed Al Harrison in Hidden Figures, a film about three Black women ( Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson ) who worked for NASA on astronaut John Glenn’s journey to space. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae portrayed the historical women , respectively. Costner’s character, meanwhile was loosely based on Robert C. Gilruth , who was the first director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“ They were already in production and hadn’t cast the role [yet] and I read it and there was something off with the role. The girls were great, so I’m not a person who likes to manipulate [a] script,” Costner remembered on Saturday . “I said, ‘Look, I just gotta tell you it’s not my M.O. to mess with scripts with this’ and it got quiet. I said, ‘It’s hard for me to explain to you because you have written these other women perfectly, but this guy is just off.’”

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Hidden Figures was co-written by the film’s director, Theodore Melfi , and Allison Schroeder .

“[Theodore] said, ‘[Al] was the only character we couldn’t get the rights to so I based it on about three different people,’” Costner said. “And I said, ‘Well, it reads like that to me. I said, tell me about the other three … [and] can we smooth this out together?’ One of the greatest experiences I had. Working with Ted was magic. He trusted me so much.”