Whitney Houston was cherished by many, including actor Kevin Costner, who gave the late vocalist a lengthy eulogy at her 2012 memorial service.
This week, Costner appeared on Dax Shepard's podcast, Armchair Expert. He recalled being one of eight people who stood at the podium to honor Whitney Houston at New Hope Baptist Church, even though he initially "didn't want to."
"When she passed away, there was a steady drum beat to hear. She was such a big personality that everybody was going on the air talking," Costner said around the 45-minute mark of the episode. "And that was not my first instinct. Even Arnold, after about five or six days, he goes, 'Kevin, you need to say something.'"
Two days after that conversation, Costner got a phone call from Houston's cousin, singer Dionne Warwick, who asked him to speak at the funeral.
“I could feel the weight on her. Now it shifted to me. What am I to say about this little girl?" Costner said. "And went back to that church in Newark, and it was filled. It was electric. There was two bands playing. The church was alive. It was like, boom. And it was a bunch of people."
He continued, "It's the place that made her. And I had been working on this speech. I talked to a friend of mine, Armie, and we'd both written down notes about it. And I tried to compile everything I wanted to do and finally crafted this speech."
But the length of Costner's speech was nearly derailed when he was given a heads-up that the service would be televised.
"Now I'm in there and I'm thinking, I really stuck out. And I'm sitting in this row and somebody said, 'CNN's here.' I go, 'CNN's here?' And they 'Go, yeah, they wouldn't mind if your remarks were kept shorter because they're gonna have commercials. And I said, 'They can get over that.'"
He added, "They can play the commercial while I'm talking. I don't care. But I've come here when I didn't want to speak, you know, I didn't want to do two minutes."
Even though Costner spent a week writing the speech, he spotted Oprah Winfrey and Diane Sawyer at the event and asked them to read his speech.
"I didn't feel like I was the right guy to go up there, but I did. And there were some people that really wanted to speak and they're kind of staring daggers at me. What was I going to say? And I started and about 17 minutes later I was done," he said.
Costner continued to speak on the podcast about his friendship with Houston, whom he'd met as his castmate on the 1992 drama The Bodyguard, in which he played the titular character, Frank Farmer, hired to protect Rachel Marron (Houston).
