Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner Forgives Madonna for Truth or Dare Diss

By Monique Jessen

05/29/2007 at 09:40 AM EDT

Kevin Costner has forgiven Madonna for making fun of him in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare.

In the film, Costner visits Madonna backstage after a concert and describes the performance as "neat." After he leaves, Madonna pretends to stick her finger down her throat and says, "Anybody who says my show is 'neat' has to go."

"Yeah, I was embarrassed by it and kind of hurt by it," Costner, 52, tells the L.A Times. "I just went back there because I was asked to go back. And I found the best word that I could. I never called her on it or whatever."

A decade later, Madonna, to Costner's surprise, made things right. "She did a really beautiful thing," he says. "She was performing [in L.A.] about three or four years ago, so I decided to take my daughters to see her. I just thought this is somebody they should see. I didn't call anybody for tickets, I just got tickets and we went down.

"And about the third song in, the lights were down, and she said, 'I want to apologize to someone.' And all of a sudden my face starts to get hot. ... She says, 'I want to apologize to Kevin Costner.' She just said it very simply. Ninety-eight percent of that audience didn't know what she was talking about. But I really respected that, and it showed me the power of just keeping your own counsel for a long time. ...

"Whatever possessed her, whatever was inside her, she came to her own decision. And a bigger thing came out of some kind of humiliation. I never wrote her to say thank you, but I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart, and that meant more to me than you could ever know."

Costner, who plays a serial killer in the new movie Mr. Brooks, recently became a dad for the fifth time when he and wife Christine Baumgartner welcomed son Cayden Wyatt on May 6.