Yellowstone’s Kevin Costner spent early career in the ‘fetal position’ living in his car

Yellowstone’s Kevin Costner lived in his car, spending days in the “fetal position” as he waited for that all-important phone call.

He may be a Hollywood icon now with a legion of fans loving him as Yellowstone patriarch John Dutton but this wasn’t always the case for actor Kevin Costner.

At the beginning of the year, the 69-year-old opened up on The Ellen DeGeneres Show about how he got started, with the host bringing up that he spent time living in his car.

Costner explained: “When I would come into Hollywood, I didn’t know anything about Hollywood.

“And I just knew that you got to kind of hang out at the place you think you’re going to work.”

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“I would drive in from Orange County and I would go up here to La Brea and Sunset right by a phone booth.

“I had a little camper shell and I didn’t know anybody. So I slept there and I kind of waited for the phone to ring. It was a payphone. It obviously didn’t ring.”

Costner elaborated that he knew just “one person in Hollywood” and made a plan to call them just once a week to “not bother them”.

“So if you think about it, graduating university and then there I am in a fetal position in a car waiting to call on Wednesday, because I thought I should call in the middle of the week and not blow my one phone call”, he said.

“But it’s hard to know how to get started. I think everybody has that particular problem and in acting it is how do you get started.”

It wasn’t a straight road to success for Costner though as he first pursued work as a stage manager before getting his very first onscreen role in 1981’s Malibu Hot Summer.

From there, work soon started snowballing, going on to appear in Night Shift, Frances, Stacy’s Knights, Table For Five and The Big Chill, just to name a few.

Eight years later, Costner starred in the memorable Field of Dreams which had been nominated for a plethora of awards across the board.

Some of his other big successes have been with Dances With Wolves, Robin Hood, The Bodyguard, A Perfect World, The Postman, Thirteen Days and Man Of Steel.

Costner has been behind John Dutton for the past six years but it remains unclear if he will return for the final episodes of Yellowstone.

The star had taken a step back from the Paramount Network drama to continue work on Horizon: An American Saga.

He reportedly now wants to return to the show for the remaining instalments but whether or not creator Taylor Sheridan would agree to this is another story.

Yellowstone is available to watch on Paramount Network.