Diane Lane says it was 'fated’ to reunite with Kevin Costner in new Western ‘Let Him Go’
Diane Lane just couldn’t let her movie husband Kevin Costner go.
The actors star as a long-married couple in the new neo-Western “Let Him Go,” which hit theaters this weekend, reuniting after playing Superman’s adoptive parents in DC’s “Man of Steel,” “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Justice League.”
“We knew we wanted to work together again, we just had to find the right material," Lane told the Daily News recently.
"And this felt kind of fated in a way, certainly hindsight makes things look that way,” said the “Trumbo” actress, referencing Costner’s busy schedule and how the movie was filmed last year, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down sets across the globe.
Lane, 55, stars as a fiercely protective grandma in the dramatic thriller based on Larry Watson’s popular 2013 novel of the same name.
She and Costner play Margaret and George Blackledge, ranchers in rural 1960s Montana who are still reeling from the sudden death of their adult son in a horse-riding accident a few years earlier. The couple ends up in a tug-of-war to bring home their young grandson after their former daughter-in-law (Kayli Carter) marries an abusive man.
“We’re all experiencing a lot of challenges and a lot of them are invisible," Lane said. “Some of them are quite tangible, obviously."
The Blackledges' grandson was just an infant when his dad died.
“It’s a tender, tender starting point,” Lane said about the movie opening with the issue of grief. “A young mind is so vulnerable.”
Relating her and Costner’s characters' anguish to the current traumas of 2020, the actress says, “We mustn’t let our spirit get broken right now. We have to be tender with ourselves, with each other, and cleave to what is good and noble.”
“Peace at any price is not always the wise path,” adds the Oscar and Emmy nominee. “But at the same time, if you lose your peace, what have you got? So we are in quite a conundrum and this story does touch on that.”
The plot’s troubles include Margaret and George’s struggles to let go of their son’s memory, of their grandson, and the duel between the pair and Lesley Manville’s intimidating and forceful Blanche Weboy, their grandson’s step-grandmother, which eventually gets physical.
“There is a polar opposite methodology to what being a mother looks like in terms of these two archetypal women in their battle royale over this grandchild,” Lane said.
Blanche “has a different ideology around the rearing of family,” adds Lane. “My grandmother, certainly the matriarch of her family, and she had 10 kids and back in those times ... corporal punishment was not off the menu. It was considered a biblical mandate.”
On the other hand, Margaret and George’s relationship sets a different tone.
“I found [it] very poignant because we see them both over the course of this journey they go on, how they... are working with each other,” said Lane. “When you have a 30-year-plus relationship, you’ve been through some stuff."
