Kevin Costner responds to rumors he is dating Jewel

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Kevin Costner has poured cold water on those Jewel romance rumors.

THE Yellow stone star stopped by SiriusXM The Howard Stern Show Tuesday June 18 to promote his new film Horizon: an American saga – and breaks his silence on this dating conversation.

He’s not connected, not in love right now. “Jewel and I are friends. We never went out,” he told Stern. “She’s special and I don’t want these rumors to ruin our friendship because that’s what we have.”

The two apparently bonded when they were hosted on Necker Island, the private retreat of Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. “I got on a plane with nine people – Jewel was one of them,” he explains. “He was someone I had great conversations with.”

The gossip columns took notice when the 50-year-old singer and the 69-year-old actor appeared together at a tennis fundraiser last December in the British Virgin Islands. Later, in April, She The magazine published an interview in which Jewel gave her own response about the two-time Oscar winner, calling him “a wonderful person,” adding, “the public fascination is certainly intense.” And that was it.

Costner had a hot streak in the late ’80s and early ’90s as the leader of the The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves And The bodyguardwhere he played the title character alongside the late superstar artist Whitney Houston.

The conversation then moved to Houston, who, by making her big screen debut as Rachel Marron and scoring a huge worldwide hit with the film’s soundtrack, became one of the biggest stars of all .

“It could have been Michelle Pfeiffer, it could have been Julia Roberts,” notes Costner, “but when I looked at it, I was like, ‘No, it should be Whitney Houston.’ He says: “For me, it was so easy to say, ‘Well, she’s the most beautiful girl, she’s the one who can sing… she’s the girl.’ »

Houston, whose life and untimely death in 2012 at age 48 are chronicled in the 2018 documentary Whitneywas initially out of his comfort zone The bodyguard.

She “didn’t really know how to do (her character’s) first line and I said, ‘We have to find the acid in you…the diva kind of moment in you,'” Costner says. “I said, ‘If you’re not sure about some things, Whitney, look at me and tell me and we’ll walk over to the corner and I’ll make it right for you.'”

It was Costner’s idea to have Houston kick off his cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” a cappella, he believes. “If she wanted to sing a song, the best way for her to show that she really loved me was to do it without a single note and that would prove how brave she is,” he says.

And suddenly Costner confirmed that he was planning to make a sequel to The bodyguard, with Princess Diana in a starring role. “She was very nice,” Costner says of the late royal, who died in 1997 at the age of 36. “I never made this film because I couldn’t replace Princess Di,” he says. Was a kissing scene written in the script? “I wasn’t going to make a big love story about it,” he admits, “but there was going to be a moment.”

Costner returns to the Wild West for the first chapter of Horizon, scheduled for release on June 28, for which he stars and directs. Ahead of the release, Costner dropped another type of project — “Mountainside Mocha Latte,” a coffee collaboration with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.