For whatever reason, people in the film and TV industry seem inclined to give Kevin Costner a ten-gallon hat and stick him on a horse. Okay, let's be real, it's not often that the Dances With Wolves director is tasked with playing a cowboy, as was the case when he starred in his own feature directorial efforts, Open Range and Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. You can actually trace the Yellowstone veteran's association with the Western genre back to the early days of his career when he starred in Lawrence Kasdan's 1985 Oscar-nominated Silverado. The duo's reunion nearly a decade later on Wyatt Earp didn't fare so well by comparison. although Costner always defended the three-hour epic.

Funnily enough, Kasdan's 1994 film (which also made the ill-advised move of arriving barely six months after George P. Kozmatos' hit theaters, the Wyatt Earp-centered classic Tombstone ) isn't Costner's longest stay in the Old West. That would be "Hatfields & McCoys," a three-part 2012 History Channel miniseries that reunited Costner with his "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and "Waterworld" helmer Kevin Reynolds. Besides being the project that finally got Reynolds out of director's jail after 2006's Tristan and Isolde (a period piece that flopped despite Sir Ridley Scott's name being prominently featured as producer), the dramatization of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud also led to Costner going up against another actor who just looks—and sounds—right in a cowboy hat: the late, great Bill Paxton.

Ironically, after becoming a Western staple, Costner himself was "born in the inner city, in Compton, California," as he explained to Collider while promoting "Hatfields & McCoys" in a 2012 interview. According to the Oscar winner, you can draw a straight line between his personal love of the genre and his experience watching Jimmy Stewart in a canoe in John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall's 1962 Western How West Vaughn Was when he was just seven years. This, in turn, fed his love of US history, which is why he knew all about the bloody, vicious, years-long conflict between the Hatfields and McCoy long before he signed on for the Reynolds miniseries.

The actor just went on to explore the events that lead William Anderson "Devil Ens" Hatfield and Randolph "Randall" McCoy (played by Costner and Paxton in "The Hatfields and McCoys") — and their respective clans — from dear friends to bitter enemies who begin near the end of the American Civil War after joining the show. Based on his reading, Costner attributes this more to intergenerational trauma and "incredible anger" after the war than to anger between the patriarchs Hatfield and McCoy. You can probably trust the man to know what he's talking about, given his meticulous preparation for the role. That extended to choosing the right hat for Devil Anse, a process that Costner assured Collider was "a very big deal."

Critics were relatively complimentary of Hatfields & McCoys (which Costner also produced), though they felt it was a little too tight-jawed for its own good. Villa Paskin, writing for salonlargely agreed with this sentiment, writing: "There is law and lawlessness toiling against a backdrop of filth, bravado and hideous voices, but all this is served up without humor and loaded with self-seriousness." Nevertheless, viewers turned out in droves to see Costner and Paxton kick the dirt in each other's faces, with the miniseries premiere becoming the most-watched non-sports telecast in ad-supported cable history at the time and fittingly. a record for the History Channel.

it turns out Kevin Costner and TV Westerns are a dynamite ratings combination - who knew?