
The actor also is preparing to play a powerful ranch owner in the TV series “Yellowstone.”
Cowboys & Indians reader favorite Kevin Costner may be taking on a new take on the Bonnie and Clyde story. According to the Deadline.com showbiz site, Costner is “in early discussions” to play legendary Texas lawman Frank Hamer, who hunted down Depression Era outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, in Highwaymen, a Netflix movie set to be directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Rookie). Woody Harrelson also has been approached to co-star as Manny Gault, Hamer’s partner in the posse that eventually caught up with the notorious criminal couple.
This version of the story, it should go without saying, will be told from a point of view markedly different than that of Bonnie and Clyde, the classic 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, which took a relatively sympathetic approach to its title characters.
While negotiations proceed apace for Highwaymen, Costner continues pre-production work for Yellowstone, the first scripted drama green-lit for the Paramount Network (as the Spike channel will be known when it is rebranded in 2018). Costner will star in the series as John Dutton, patriarch of the family that owns the largest contiguous ranch in the United States. According to the network, Yellowstone “is an intense study of a violent world far from media scrutiny — where land grabs make developers billions, and politicians are bought and sold by the world’s largest oil and lumber corporations. Where drinking water poisoned by fracking wells and unsolved murders are not news: they are a consequence of living in the new frontier. It is the best and worst of America seen through the eyes of a family that represents both.”
Yellowstone will be written and directed by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, whose credits include Sicario, Hell or High Water, and the forthcoming Wind River.