Why Hidden Figures Script Immediately Added Up for Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons

Why Hidden Figures Immediately Added Up for Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons

"Hidden Figures" has charmed audiences and critics. And from the very beginning, the stars also sensed something special about this story that history had overlooked.

"When we see a movie for the first time, we see it in its rawest form. We see it on pages. It's not realized the way you see it," Kevin Costner tells Made in Hollywood reporter Kylie Erica Mar. "So we have to imagine what this could be."

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Kevin Costner Plays a NASA Manager in Hidden Figures

Set at the dawn of the American space program, "Hidden Figures" follows three brilliant African-American women -- played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae -- who provide important mathematical data to make the first space launches successes.

Costner plays a gum-smacking, crew-cutted NASA project manager dealing with the mounting racial tensions within his ranks.

"It's very difficult to predict what a hit will be, but it's not hard to know what a good movie is," says Costner. "And so the satisfaction in 'Hidden Figures' ... is that we know this movie will be a movie that is very easy for people to watch and view and pass down 25 years from now."

Jim Parsons, who plays Costner's increasingly overlooked pet employee, saw the film's potential as soon as he read the script.

"You never know once it gets through everybody's hands what's going to come out at the other end," he says. "There was no denying this had all the makings of a very surprising story. Not just because it was actual history that everyone didn't know, but the way it unfolds, the way it's being told, it just has a certain feel to it. You know this could really be something."

Both credit director/co-screenwriter Theodore Melfi. "It was everything it seemed like it was going to be and a little bit more," says Parsons. "It really was. He is such a good storyteller, Ted is, and he was so clear about it."