Val Kilmer

Once pegged as a great hope for young American actors, and even a prodigy (he was at the time the youngest acting student to ever attend Julliard’s theater program), Val Kilmer (birthname: Val Edward Kilmer) has experienced dramatic highs and lows in an adventurous career. His life experiences have been enough to comprise perhaps the most personal, self-revealing, and accomplished documentary on an American actor’s life in recent decades, Val (2021).

Drawn to acting as a serious artist (Kilmer wrote and acted in a play, How It All Began, which transferred from Julliard workshops to the Public Theatre), Kilmer became a major movie star within a few years while retaining fairly radical method approaches, intentionally losing himself in the roles he took on.

After Julliard, Val Kilmer landed roles in comedies Top Secret! (1984) and, as a star, Real Genius (1985), but although he only joined the ensemble of Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986), with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, because of contractual obligations, his role of Iceman established him as a global star. Kilmer co-starred with future wife Joanne Whalley back to back in Ron Howard’s Willow (1988) and in John Dahl’s very good noir, Kill Me Again (1989).

Kilmer’s profile rose even higher in the early 90s; first as an extremely convincing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), then as an FBI agent in Michael Apted’s fine contemporary Western, Thunderheart (1992), with Sam Shepard and Graham Greene; as Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993) with Kurt Russell and Sam Elliott; and, to huge pre-release publicity, as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995), with Nicole Kidman, Chris O’Donnell, Jim Carrey, and Tommy Lee Jones.

This interesting period for Kilmer also included a striking appearance as Elvis Presley (just two years after his Jim Morrison!)  in Tony Scott’s/Quentin Tarantino’s stylish True Romance (1993), with Christian Slater, and another strong supporting turn opposite Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in one of the decade’s key movies, Michael Mann’s Heat (1995).

Things took an unfortunate turn for Val Kilmer after this, with a disastrous collaboration with director John Frankenheimer and Marlon Brando on The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996); the critically lambasted The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) with Michael Douglas; a negligible attempt to revive The Saint (1997) as a hoped-for franchise, and the box-office bomb Red Planet (2000). It was enough to make a serious dent in Hollywood’s perception of Val Kilmer as a box-office name, along with some accounts of his “difficult” relationships with directors and actors: while Michael Mann reportedly loved Kilmer on Heat, John Frankenheimer vowed never to work with him again after Dr. Moreau. 

Val Kilmer turned to noir for a modest career revival in the cult hit, The Salton Sea (2002) with Vincent D’Onofrio, and as porn star John Holmes in the effective true-crime Wonderland (2003), plus one of Ron Howard’s best movies, The Missing (2003) with Cate Blanchett, and David Mamet’s thriller, Spartan (2004), with William H. Macy and Kristen Bell. Kilmer reunited with Oliver Stone for one of the director’s uncharacteristic costume dramas, Alexander (2004) with Colin Farrell, and finished his major movie run with Shane Black’s crime drama-comedy, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) with Robert Downey, Jr.

With just a few exceptions—such as Tony Scott’s terrific Déjà Vu (2006), and Werner Herzog’s vivid Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) with Nicolas Cage—Val Kilmer and his movies after 2005 went generally nowhere commercially or artistically, and many of them went straight to video.

This included work with major directors like Francis Ford Coppola (the ignored Twixt in 2011), Terrence Malick (the endemic Song to Song in 2017), and Tomas Alfredson (the disappointing The Snowman in the same year). Val Kilmer notably continued working recovering from throat cancer from 2015 to 2017 and enduring severe damage to his voice, which was significantly repaired by 2021 due to new AI technology. Certainly, the arrival of the highly original autobiographical Val shifted the popular perception of Kilmer, and his return as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) marks his first wide-audience appearance in familiar surroundings in well over a decade.