Kevin Costner | Biography, Movies, & Facts - Britannica

Open Range, Hidden Figures, and Molly’s Game

In the early 21st century Costner directed his third film, the western Open Range (2003), in which he also starred. He continued to act in such movies as Thirteen Days (2000), a dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis; the comic dramas The Upside of Anger (2005) and Swing Vote (2008); and the action movie The Guardian (2006). Costner then was cast as the head of the Hatfield family in the television miniseries Hatfields & McCoys (2012), for which he won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe.

He returned to movies in 2013 with the Superman film Man of Steel, playing Clark Kent’s adoptive father. In 2014 Costner portrayed a veteran CIA agent in the thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a spy trying to manage his family life in 3 Days to Kill, the general manager of an NFL team in Draft Day, and a single man trying to raise his biracial granddaughter in Black or White. The next year he starred as a high-school cross-country running coach in McFarland, USA.

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Diverging from type, Costner portrayed a psychopathic death-row inmate who has a dead CIA agent’s consciousness transferred to his brain in the thriller Criminal (2016). That same year he appeared in the acclaimed Hidden Figures, about three real-life African American women who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the early years of the American space program. In the biopic Molly’s Game (2017), Costner played the estranged father of Molly Bloom, who became famous when she was arrested for her role in an illegal high-stakes poker ring favored by Hollywood celebrities.