By Charles Hubbard, Theatre and Performance Studies Undergrad
One of Hollywood’s most distinctive, idiosyncratic and fascinating leading men, Kilmer is best-known for his portrayals of daredevil pilot Iceman in Top Gun, the titular caped crusader in Batman Forever and iconic rock star Jim Morrison in The Doors. However, he was so much more than just the sum of his most famous leading man roles.
The reason why Val Kilmer is so fascinating to me and so many other film fans is that he vehemently defied categorization at every turn, meaning that no log line at the top of a newspaper obituary can remotely do him justice (though I tried my best). He was certainly a leading man for a period of time, scoring top billing on several major tentpole blockbusters and big-budget comedies. However, he always yielded an intrinsic sense of weirdness that stood him in direct opposition to his matinee idol good looks, and that no bland or formulaic role could beat out of him. For example, you might be surprised to hear that Kilmer started his career onstage at the beloved Public Theatre in New York. A Juilliard graduate, he made his Broadway debut in John Byrne’s The Slab Boys with Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon before taking on the endlessly vaunted role of Hamlet in 1988. Here, Kilmer developed his acting skills, his trademark dramatic intensity and his notorious tendency to argue with the director and attempt to take the film in his own direction.
This tendency, above his myriad of well-documented health issues, was always the reason why Kilmer never flew quite as high as he ought to have done. John Frankenheimer, who directed Kilmer and the similarly temperamental Marlon Brando in the ill-fated 1996 remake of The Island of Dr Moreau said that he would never work with Kilmer again. Joel Schumacher, the director of Batman Forever (usually very measured and complimentary of his leading stars), called him “childish and impossible”, demanding that the role be recast for the sequel. In fact, Tony Scott (the director of Top Gun, True Romance and Déja Vu, all of which starred Kilmer) was the only filmmaker willing to work with Kilmer multiple times. Many other well-respected leading men over the years have been difficult to work with and have constantly fought with their directors. Dustin Hoffman and Edward Norton were notoriously argumentative control freaks in their time and yet had no trouble finding major roles at the height of their careers. However, they always had the crash mat of critical respectability to fall back on every time the director threatened to fire them. But Kilmer was never quite able to achieve the level of serious critical respect he deserved. While he saw his co-stars and contemporaries Tom Cruise, Kurt Russell and Nicholas Cage go on to have incredibly robust careers working with major filmmakers, Kilmer’s ceiling always seemed a little too low. He was notably never nominated for a single Academy Award. That’s not to say that Kilmer burned bridges with all his directors. After his death, Michael Mann (who directed Kilmer in Heat) and Francis Ford Coppola (who directed him in Twixt) both spoke very highly of him and called him “wonderful to work with.” In addition to this, Kilmer also worked with such industry titans as Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog over the course of his career.
Kilmer notably experienced a series of health problems in the latter stage of his career once he hit 50. In 2014, he had to cancel a performance of his one man show Citizen Twain after losing his voice and, a year later, was hospitalised due to the presence of a possible tumour. Kilmer, who held devout Christian Science beliefs, often resisted the conventional methods of medical assistance, instead attributing improvements in his health to answers to prayer and even denying that he had throat cancer until December 2017. His resulting loss of speech was written into his character for his performance in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, in which he reprised his iconic turn as Iceman in what would turn out to be his very last performance. If Kilmer hadn’t faced such extreme health difficulties when he was still relatively young, it would have been easy to imagine him experiencing a comeback in his latter years, akin to that of Alec Baldwin (perhaps the closest comparator to Kilmer when it comes to their careers as both leading men and character actors). In fact, Shane Black’s excellent 2005 buddy cop comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was intended as a major comeback for both Kilmer and his co-star Robert Downey Jr, yet did not receive a wide release and was therefore a box office disappointment. Downey was given his comeback several years later when he was cast as Iron Man, a role that would go on to define his career and make him one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, eventually winning an Academy Award. Unfortunately, no such luck for Kilmer.
For many, Kilmer always shone the brightest when placed in supporting roles when he wasn’t forced to carry the weight of a major studio tentpole. In fact, he is part of a long line of actors (Robert Pattinson possibly being the most recent) who have the acting approaches and tastes of character actors yet are placed in leading man roles because of their good looks. My personal favourite performance of Kilmer’s is in Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat as volatile bank robber Chris Shiherlis, in which he completely holds his own against Hollywood legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. His brief but indelible depiction of Elvis Presley in True Romance is in the running for the best cinematic representation of the king and rock and roll. Furthermore, his powerhouse, scene-stealing performance as dentist-turned-gunman Doc Holliday in George P. Cosmatos’ 1993 western Tombstone turned what could have been a disposable genre riff into one of the greatest westerns of its decade. While his turn as Batman may be his most uncharacteristically muted performance, being outshone by the much louder performances of Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones, Bob Kane (the creator of Batman) always maintained that Kilmer was exactly the kind of man he had in mind when he created Bruce Wayne.
Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once mused "if there is an award for the most unsung leading man of his generation, Kilmer should get it.” And I think I might have to agree with him.
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