With the success of movies like Bull Durham and The Bodyguard, Kevin Costner became one of the hottest leading men in Hollywood. Costner would also branch into directing, hitting a major bulls-eye with 1990’s Dances With Wolves, which won an Oscar for Best Picture, beating out Goodfellas.
After sweeping the Academy Awards with Wolves, Costner would have another major hit at the box office with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which was the second highest-grossing film of 1991, and it also yielded the hit Bryan Adams song “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You.”
Yet during the Robin Hood shoot, Costner’s stuntman apparently had more on his mind than making the movie, and he took the star on a merry hunt for magic mushrooms in the forest.
As Costner recalled with a smile on The Rich Eisen Show, during a lunch break his stuntman asked if he wanted to go hunt for mushrooms. When the star naively asked what kind of mushrooms they’d be looking for, his stuntman replied, “You know, the good kind.”
“So we went out into this field,” Costner continued, “and he’s telling me what they look like, and I’m kinda lookin’ for ‘em, I’m dressed up like Robin … He finds one, then he finds another one, and I can’t find one. After he finds a few of these things, I said, ‘Hey man, how come you’re seeing them? How does this work?’ He said, ‘You have a mushroom, and then they tell you where to find the others.’”
Before Costner and the stuntman could potentially indulge in any psychedelic fun, the star realized they would soon have to shoot a sword fight together, which obviously wouldn’t be a good idea on ‘shrooms. “You know, that’s a good point too,” the stuntman said.
Costner kept a clear head during the sword fight, and after filming for the day, he finally located some mushrooms himself. “Did they tell you to find others?” Eisen asked, and Costner replied laughing, “They tell you exactly where to find them.”
While Costner didn’t reveal where exactly he and his stuntman went on their magic mushroom hunt, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was shot throughout England, including locations such as Aysgarth Falls in Yorkshire, and the legendary Hardraw Force waterfall in North Yorkshire.