Val Kilmer, Hollywood’s oddball bad boy, was the real deal until the end

Val Kilmer, the enigmatic actor, revered as much for his relentless authenticity as he was for his bevy of charismatic onscreen performances — playing everyone from the Caped Crusader to Jim Morrison — died at the age of 65. The news of Kilmer’s death was first reported by the New York Times and was later confirmed by Kilmer’s daughter, Mercedes, in an email to the Associated Press, adding that the beloved actor, who died of pneumonia, was “surrounded by family and friends” at the time of his passing.

Kilmer was previously diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, for which he underwent two tracheostomies. The operations left Kilmer without much of a voice but still able to speak, a feat he credited to vocal exercises he learned while studying at Juilliard right out of high school. At 17, Kilmer was once the youngest to be accepted into the prestigious art college. But the regimented way of conservatory learning was an affront to Kilmer’s wily country-boy sensibilities. Though he was born and raised in the greater Los Angeles area, Kilmer preferred to avoid the industry town’s notorious glitz and loved to be outdoors whenever he could. “I always related to the wilderness and spent a lot of time in the wild,” he told The Juilliard Journal in 2005. In the same interview, Kilmer talked about how he’d go to Central Park and hug trees to feel grounded while studying drama.

That rustic presence translated well on the silver screen, blown up 50-feet-tall in films like 1992’s “Thunderheart” and the following year’s “Tombstone,” the latter of which gave Kilmer one of his most notable roles as the legendary gunslinger Doc Holliday. In “Tombstone,” Kilmer more than held his own against industry vets like Sam Elliott, Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton, earning his top billing and becoming commercially viable in the eyes of Hollywood producers. 

But behind the scenes, Kilmer was already developing a reputation for being tough to work with. Kevin Jarre — the original director of “Tombstone” who was replaced by George P. Cosmatos after a month of filming — told Entertainment Weekly, “There’s a dark side to Val that I don’t feel comfortable talking about.” According to Jarre, Kilmer told the director, “As you know, I have a reputation for being difficult. But only with stupid people.”

Kilmer’s notion that only the unintelligent could perceive him as difficult is striking in that it’s almost remarkably self-aware. He was part of a dying breed in Hollywood, one of the last actors who wasn’t afraid of authenticity, onscreen and off. Had Kilmer come up in the industry today, he would’ve been eaten alive before he even had the chance to prove himself “difficult,” tossed out on his haunches for moving against the status quo for the sake of his craft. 

In the ’90s, Kilmer came close to such unceremonious dismissals. The production of 1996’s “The Island of Doctor Moreau” was famously tortured, producing the type of unmitigated chaos that feels almost mythic today. A May 1996 Entertainment Weekly cover story, titled “Why Val Kilmer is the man Hollywood loves to hate,” chronicled the chaos. Another director was fired, the production stopped and started countless times, lines were thrown out and Kilmer allegedly burned a camera operator’s face with his cigarette. Kilmer and his co-star Marlon Brando traded barbs and clashed egos. At one point, Brando told him, “Your problem is you confuse your talent with the size of your paycheck.” Big talk from the guy who had his lines fed through an earpiece while filming.

Val Kilmer visits the United Nations headquarters in New York, New York, to promote the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) initiative, July 20, 2019. (EuropaNewswire/Gado/Getty Images)

Though Kilmer’s questionable behavior was well-documented, it never negated his talent. He was a sought-after performer because of his ability to tap into a character, going deep into their idiosyncrasies to flesh them out far beyond the pages of a script. And what’s more, he could do this in mainstream films made to be enjoyed by wide audiences just as ably as he could in smaller features, playing peculiar supporting roles. Maybe it wasn’t the egomania that fueled Kilmer’s reputation, but his fervent desire to make everything he did undeniably interesting, sometimes at the expense of the films around him. Genuine care for the art is a surprisingly rare thing in the movie business, and anyone who studies Kilmer’s performances can see that, even with shoddy material, he gave himself to his films every minute in front of the camera.

His unfettered commitment and remarkable presence scored Kilmer a sizable fanbase long before his ailments forced him to reduce his work later in life. “Top Gun” made Kilmer a household name with a relatively minuscule role. This was thanks in no small part to the beach volleyball scene, in which Kilmer oozed the sort of hunky machismo that’s even more beguiling the more you try to resist it. Iceman the fighter pilot left viewers swooning, but the part also underscored his power to carry a movie, even when he wasn’t billed as its lead. 

In 1991’s “The Doors,” Oliver Stone pushed the boundaries of a music biopic to make a calamitous, imperfect work that could accurately reflect the spectacle that was Jim Morrison’s life. Whether or not Stone’s film was successful in that respect is arguable, but Kilmer’s performance as The Doors’ frontman certainly is not. Kilmer’s star turn embodies sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It also recognizes that the fabled idea of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is utter bulls**t. Kilmer’s take on Morrison is wrapped in the singer’s own myth, and it’s a searing look at how destroying yourself for the sake of your work is not an inherently noble artistic cause. 

One might say that Kilmer adopted that outlook during the latter half of his career. “Batman Forever,” Joel Schumacher’s 1995 take on the Dark Knight, received a middling response from critics and audiences. Yet, Kilmer provided the inherently goofy superhero with just the right amount of absurdity (aided by Schumacher’s addition of hard nipples built into the Batsuit). In an Entertainment Weekly cover story — one year before the magazine’s “Moreau” chronicle — Kilmer said, “I’ve done an absurdly commercial cartoon, and now I’m more likely to get a job I couldn’t get before.” Maybe a quote like that might lend itself to industry power players positing that Kilmer was difficult. I’d say it’s as good an argument for the merits of his unyielding honesty and authenticity as any.

Following “Batman Forever” was a slew of weirder, more exciting projects like “Heat,” “The Saint” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” which further demonstrated Kilmer’s knack for surprising audiences by using his leading man looks to develop oddball characters. (The catty, gay private investigator in the latter is a tried and true late-period Kilmer favorite.) In the 2010s, Kilmer wound down his output, focusing more on his art, painting and drawing regularly, and selling his works directly to consumers through his website. There, he updated his fanbase with journal entries, reflections on his current artistic pursuits and the occasional bit of news about new film projects. 

Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise on the set of “Top Gun” (Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)Ten minutes spent flicking through his site will tell you far more about Kilmer and his artistic philosophy throughout his entire career as any trenchant ’90s print exposé will. In tandem with the 2021 documentary “Val,” which sifts through hundreds of hours of self-recorded tapes shot throughout Kilmer’s life, his website and the works he sold through it are the best possible look at his artistic sensibility. Retreating to the nature he grew up in and unburdened by the press and the stinging lights of Hollywood, Kilmer created works that were entirely from his perspective. After decades of clashing with actors and directors about his vision for the films he worked on, Kilmer could make art according to his own standards and at his own pace. “I’ve been living with this new series of abstract prints for a couple of weeks now and they make me happy every day,” he wrote last summer on X. “Sometimes life feels like a splash of chaos that somehow just works. Take some time to be quiet for a bit each day and look at something that will feed your mind’s eye. It will open you up to wonderful things.”

Kilmer’s gentle, introspective view of his artwork is especially stirring when remembering that, for many years, the actor was more famous for his reputation as a menace on film sets than for his performances. These warring images of Kilmer — one as the bulldozing boor who wasn’t afraid to voice his opinions to his directors and fellow actors, the other as a tenderhearted artist trying to capture life’s fleeting charm — present a far more nuanced picture of an actor who lived for his work than any Hollywood tall tale could. In a fantastic New York Times profile from 2020, features writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner began to get at the heart of Kilmer’s eccentricity. “His gift was so overt and so subtle that he became the best part of the movies he merely supported,” Brosser-Akner wrote. “But the bigger [the roles] came, the more empty and cavernous too.” The piece, published in May of that year, extols Kilmer’s dogged positivity, even at the pandemic’s terrifying peak. “You can’t cancel the world, right?” Kilmer said in the profile. “Bad things happen, but you still need art.”

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that quote could be Kilmer’s lifelong doctrine, and now, the legacy he’ll leave behind. Life is a horribly awkward, complex and demanding thing. You can be a difficult person — even close to radioactive at times — and still admire the beauty of the world and be a proponent of all of the gifts it can supply you. Life can soften you and harden you in equal measure. Perhaps it was either of those versions that any one of Kilmer’s collaborators met on a given day and why his colleagues all had something entirely different to say about him. But how boring would this existence be if it were one monotonous walk toward the end? Maybe Kilmer strayed from that rigid path too often for some people’s liking, but his deviations from the expected also made hundreds more fall head over heels for his work. He wasn’t an actor for fame or fortune, but to look at life from all of its different vantage points.

In the final edition of his email newsletter — another fabulously Val Kilmer-ian feature of his website — Kilmer stressed the importance of admiring those new perspectives whenever we might stumble onto them. “I’m hoping you’re all in a place where you can appreciate all of the small joys that sneak up on us every day,” Kilmer wrote. “Like the sound of a friend’s voice or that odd and specific color of blue that happens in the sky — that shade, right there . . . and now it’s gone. Enjoy. Have fun. Slow down and look and listen deeply to what’s around you. You will be rewarded.”