Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Costner joined “The Will Cain Show” to discuss his new three-part series on Fox Nation, “Yellowstone to Yosemite,” a documentary he describes as showing how men and women can make a difference through a “force of will.”
“While we all enjoy [the Yellowstone national parks], very rarely do we actually understand how they came to be,” Costner told host Will Cain. “And when you think about things in life, it’s like, are we ever going to make a difference in our life? I mean, I ask myself that. Everybody does. I mean, there’s a billion of us on this planet now. What do we do? But it’s a story about how men and women can really make a difference through a force of will.”
The series retraces the steps of President Theodore Roosevelt and environmental advocate John Muir’s three-day trip through Yosemite in 1903, with the third and final episode dropping Wednesday on Fox Nation.
Muir’s journey with Roosevelt led to the president signing legislation that began the National Park System, starting with Yosemite National Park and creating 150 national forests, five national parks, and preserving 230 million acres of land.
Outside the duo’s journey, Costner emphasized the importance of including Native American history in the project. “Yellowstone to Yosemite” is notable for focusing on land’s “natural beauty,” Costner added.
Kevin Costner previously told a story of the American West with “Horizon: An American Saga.” (Warner Bros.)
“The important thing for me was we deal with the story before John Muir shows up, which is the Native Americans have this whole country, and they have Yosemite. And what happened to them was a travesty,” Costner said.
“And that’s not very often talked about, but we deal with it in the documentary,” Costner explained. “Not to pound people in the head, but just to educate. But again, you know, America found a way where land would have a use other than just exploiting it, that the natural beauty could perhaps be turned into a level of commerce where people would come and what they saw as a child, their own children would see.”
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When Cain asked Costner what values in certain scripts draw him in, the actor described an unsung and less glamorous version of Hollywood’s typical “notion of heroism when everything is on the line.”
“The notion of heroism when no one’s looking,” Costner replied. “I think when you’re a child or young man or young woman and you see that, you realize, you know, the heroism of a woman who works three jobs, you see her four in the morning, every morning at a bus stop. And by the end of the evening, when she gets home so tired and makes a meal for her kids, she’s gone to three different places to work in movies. We can sometimes depict that and we lay music to it, and suddenly we know who’s important. Suddenly we know who is powerful, who is a hero, a hero in her own family, that she would work that way to make life better for her children.”
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