Costner Casts His Vote

At 53, Actor-Producer-Director Enjoys Being in Charge

When Kevin Costner was 18 years old, he wanted to drive across the country with friends. His friends wouldn't come, so he went by himself.

When he was 19, he wanted to go work on fishing boats. He implored his buddies to join him, but they refused. He went on without them.

When he was in his early 50s, he decided to make a movie about a dim, profane, beer-guzzling New Mexican hillbilly who is called upon to decide the outcome of a presidential election. Had they been asked, some of Costner's friends (and who knows how many studio executives) might've passed on this particular adventure, as well.

Which is, of course, irrelevant. The comedy "Swing Vote" opens today.

"Some people say I'm a loner. And the truth is, I don't think that at all 'cause I love people," Costner says, his blue jeans and scuffed boots in sharp relief to the floral pattern of a Four Seasons couch in one of the half-dozen suites required for his presence in Washington during a recent media tour.

"What I'm not afraid to do is go alone," he adds.

In this third decade of his career, the 53-year old actor seems to have fully assumed the posture of an aging cowboy, one who has ridden the land long enough to wearily know its secrets, schisms and sorrows.

The open collar of an untucked shirt reveals a neck and chest deeply reddened by strong strokes of California and Colorado sun. His tan face, lined and freckled, leads to a thinning muss of ash-blond hair. Sunglasses stay on indoors, and there is more seriousness than warmth to his presence. Many more proclamations of wisdom than of wonder.

"I can't be talked out of what I think I like," he says staunchly, as if a line had just been drawn in the sand. "Whether it's friendship or professional direction or whatever."

It is a life of his choosing, he would say, including a career defined in equal measure by stunning success and profound mediocrity. Such is the fate of an actor who found himself able to green-light multimillion-dollar projects with just a nod and scribbled signature.

"I'm not worried about being judged," he proclaims with a swagger befitting the boots. "I didn't want to be held back by the conventions of fear or the conventional wisdom of anything. Because, you know, what if everybody's wrong?"

Costner has produced (and thus possessed a requisite degree of control over) 15 of the more than 40 films he has appeared in since the early 1980s. Among them is 1990's sweeping epic "Dances With Wolves," which garnered seven Academy Awards, including the one Costner took home for Best Director. Also among them are last year's horror flick "Mr. Brooks," 1999's romance "Message in a Bottle" and the extravagant 1995 box office bomb "Waterworld."