Kevin Costner refused to shorten his eulogy at Whitney Houston’s funeral

Kevin Costner never stopped being protective of his friend and castmate Whitney Houston after they starred together in The Bodyguard — not even after her tragic death two decades later.

On the latest episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Costner looked back on his bond with Houston and the emotional eulogy he delivered at her funeral, which he refused to shorten despite timing constraints.

“I had been working on this speech… and I tried to compile everything I wanted to do and finally crafted this speech,” Costner, 69, recalled. “Somebody said, ‘CNN’s here, they wouldn’t mind if your remarks were kept shorter because they’re going to have commercials.’ And I said, ‘They can get over that. They can play the commercial while I’m talking, I don’t care.'”

Costner wanted to make sure he said everything he “needed to say” in his speech. “I started and about 17 minutes later I was done,” he added.

The actor was one of eight speakers at Houston’s funeral in 2012, after she died from an accidental drowning. He was invited to speak due to his close relationship with the singer, which began when they made The Bodyguard together in 1992. The romantic drama starred Houston as a famous singer who is haunted by a stalker and falls in love with her bodyguard, played by Costner.

Though Houston and Costner remained close over the next 20 years, he was initially hesitant to speak at her funeral. It was only thanks to Dionne Warwick’s encouragement that he finally said yes.

“I could feel the weight on her, now it’s shifted to me,” Costner remembered on the podcast. “What am I going to say about this little girl? [I] went back to that church in Newark and it was filled. It was electric. There were two bands playing, the church was alive. It was like, boom!”

In addition to starring in The Bodyguard, Houston co-executive-produced and recorded six new songs for the soundtrack, including her hit cover of Dolly Parton‘s “I Will Always Love You,” which remains one of the best-selling physical singles of all time and won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1994. (The soundtrack itself won Album of the Year.)

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“I don’t think we’ll ever forget when that little song came out, that [Houston] just blew up,” Costner recalled in 2022. “She sang the first part of it a cappella and musically the world was never the same. We have a moment of her in that movie we’ll never ever forget that and I think that when movies are working at their best, that’s what can happen.”