Wichita native winds up in Kevin Costner’s latest film: ‘We want to . . . murder you’

Wichita native Matt Combs has had all kinds of accomplishments in his career, including making a musical living in Nashville, arranging and playing on a Johnny Cash album and being nominated for two Grammy Awards.

He’s also helped score movies and appeared in the “Nashville” TV show as a band member on screen .

Now, he’s got a new achievement to add to the list: an acting role, albeit brief, in Kevin Costner’s new multipart movie , “Horizon: An American Saga.”

Though the scene has plenty of drama and Combs had fun, it wasn’t exactly glamorous work.

“Screen work is slow at best and pretty tedious.”

Combs first met Costner around 2007 when he filled in for another fiddle player at one of his shows.

“Music is one of his loves.”

That’s how Combs met Teddy Morgan, Costner’s producer, and began playing fiddle on Costner’s recordings.

He’s since toured with Costner, whom he called classy and genial, and gotten to know him.

“It’s a lot of fun to be out there with him. He’s a great guy and a good hang. . . . He’s just a real down-to-earth person that I really enjoy spending time with.”

He said they play Americana rock ’n’ roll with a western flair.

Combs and Morgan created three pieces for “Horizon,” Costner’s longtime passion project. They knew their portion would be set in an 1860s dance hall tent, but otherwise, they didn’t have much direction.

“We just sort of went by our instinct,” Combs said. “I think it really set the right tone.”

Apparently others thought so as well since the music, with its waltz theme, also ended up as snippets in the movie’s orchestral score in eight different places.

Combs said it was fun and interesting to hear his music fleshed out that way by someone else.

When it came time to shoot a dance scene, Combs and Morgan donned period costumes to play as the background band. They’d already taken Costner’s advice and grown beards.

Combs said it took him a couple of months to grow, and he couldn’t wait to get rid of it. As soon as he was done shooting, he got permission to shave.

Then he got another call.

“Well, we want to bring you back out here and murder you.”

So Combs returned for part of the scene where he, a fiddler, is running out of the tent and an actor, Owen Crowshoe, playing the lead Apache warrior, shoots him with three arrows as he’s protecting his fiddle.

“He comes over and tries to wrestle my fiddle out of my hand, and I won’t let him have it even though I’m laying there with three arrows sticking out of my chest. . . . And then I drop the fiddle and perish.”

That was four hours of work for 35 seconds of film.

A stunt man taught him how to stumble back a bit and fall into a couch, hidden by the tent, that was positioned to catch him.

Combs made it clear he wouldn’t use his body to protect his fiddle in real life, but for the scene, “I just tried to put myself in that position and tried to be honest with it.”

The movie “was a really kind of a bizarre, comic set up for what I was about to face personally.”

Combs had “a personal brush with death” not long after filming when he got a severe staph infection in a bone, which had nothing to do with his work in the film.

He recovered and continues to focus on the session work that is his mainstay.

His and Morgan’s “Songs from Horizon” is available on music-streaming platforms .

It’s all a long way from where Combs started musically.

As a student at Wichita Collegiate, he studied classical music and continued in college at the University of Michigan even when he realized he’d developed more of a love for fiddling than violin.

“Wow,” he said he realized, “this is a lot of fun.”

He’d also grown up playing jazz with his father, percussionist and former Wichita State University music professor J.C. Combs, and his brothers.

Combs credits his mother, Karen, as the one who “was kind of spearheading the practicing.”

“I had a diverse and active musical lifestyle when I was a kid.”

In 1997, Combs moved to Nashville without knowing anyone and took advantage of playing with a lot of older bluegrass and country musicians who now are gone. He eventually played in staff bands at the Grand Ole Opry.

Combs, who has three daughters, said he likes session work in order to be at home instead of traveling, which is “a lot of rigmarole to do an hour’s worth of fun on stage.”

Also, he said he enjoys creating new music rather than playing the same songs over and over in concert.

Combs said he’s open to doing more acting, but he’s not exactly seeking it.

“I don’t have an agent, let’s put it that way,” he said. “If somebody sees my death scene and goes, ‘That’s my guy,’ . . . we’ll just have to see.”

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