Val Kilmer obituary: mercurial A-lister who toggled between total immersion and resistance

“Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it.” So said John Frankenheimer after working with Kilmer on 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a famously troubled production that cinched its leading man’s reputation as an on-set menace. In an Entertainment Weekly feature entitled ‘Psycho Kilmer’, no less an authority on thespian malcontent than Marlon Brando opined that his co-star had confused “his talent with the size of his paycheck”.

With all due respect to Brando, there wasn’t a paycheck big enough that Kilmer’s talent couldn’t cash. The Los Angeles-born actor, who has died at the age of 65 of pneumonia after a prolonged battle with throat cancer, was a uniquely mercurial A-lister, an authentic heir to Brando who included a wicked little riff on Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s gonzo Roger Corman homage Twixt (2011). 

As for what a movie called The Life of Val Kilmer might actually look like, the actor took care of it himself, commissioning a documentary portrait – edited together out of hundreds of hours of personal footage and narrated by Kilmer’s son, Jack – entitled Val (2021). The film is open about its subject’s myriad eccentricities, but the overall picture is of a thoughtful man who recognises his capabilities for self-destruction. When asked about his favourite part of the film, Kilmer offered a characteristically contradictory answer. “Anything with Marlon,” he said. “I loved him.”

Like Brando, who also kept recordings of himself for posterity, Kilmer was a Method actor who toggled between total immersion in his roles – as in his uncanny impersonation of Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) – and a form of stubborn, intractable resistance. 

Having been deemed bankable enough in the mid-1990s to play Batman, Kilmer glowered manfully beneath the cowl for the duration of one instalment (1995’s garish and, in retrospect, ironically titled Batman Forever) before wiggling out of his contract. He cut a far more compelling figure the same year in a crucial supporting role in Michael Mann’s Heat as a high-priced triggerman trying to do right by his friends and family. His Chris Shiherlis is a crackshot with a tender heart; Kilmer’s aching romantic despair as the character describes his wife – “for me, the sun rises and sets with her” – effectively transubstantiates pulp into poetry.

Born into a working-class family and raised in accordance with the tenets of Christian Science (“I inherited [the] faith through hard-fought experimentation and proof,” he wrote in his autobiography), Kilmer became one of the youngest people ever accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. In the early 1980s, he honed his chops as a stage actor, at one point appearing in a Broadway production of John Byrne’s play The Slab Boys. “Mr Kilmer brings fine, firm shading to the seemingly placid Alan,” wrote The New York Times’ Frank Rich, while alluding to the fact that, compared to his co-stars, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon, who’d already made their film debuts, the young actor was an unknown commodity. 

Kilmer’s own big-screen breakthrough was a far cry from The Slab Boys’ kitchen-sink realism. Instead, he was cast – very fortuitously – in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team’s Cold War-espionage-movie spoof Top Secret! (1984) as a world-beating American rock’n’roller, Nick Rivers, who joins forces with anti-fascist revolutionaries in between note-perfect pastiches of 1950s pop songs.

Kilmer is pricelessly funny in Top Secret!, leveraging his chiselled, golden-boy handsomeness against vaudevillian physical comedy and a winning sense of good sportsmanship. He got the part largely because he came to the audition dressed like Elvis Presley, a persona he reprised nearly a decade later, in a decidedly more hallucinatory vein, in Tony Scott’s ultra-violent thriller True Romance (1993). Rock’n’roll was in Kilmer’s bones; he idolised David Bowie and blitzed his way through a music festival set with the Black Lips for Terrence Malick’s Song to Song (2017), at one point sawing an amplifier in half with a chainsaw.

There are other memorable Kilmer performances, each riven with fragments of spontaneity. He eagerly snapped his jaws at Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986) and deadened his eyes as Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), a turn that impressed Bob Dylan. He masticated David Mamet’s bloody-rare dialogue in Spartan (2004) and got bitchy as a private investigator named Gay Perry in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). He basically fulfilled his dream of being a Saturday Night Live regular by clowning around as a supervillain named Dieter Von Cunth in MacGruber (2010). There are also tantalising what-ifs: Kilmer auditioned for Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Goodfellas (1990) and declined the chance to play the lead in Blue Velvet (1986). “I was just too shy back then,” he explained in an Attitude interview.

Fittingly for a performer who spent the last decade of his career arranging different iterations of a one-man show in which he played Mark Twain, Kilmer was always good for a quote. “I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone’s life,” he said while promoting Tombstone; when Lou Reed died, Kilmer tweeted that his friendship with the Velvet Underground frontman had been damaged by his decision to tickle him at a party. “He spoke to me few times after that dinner. But I’m glad now. He needed it.” 

The same cheerful, heart-on-sleeve weirdness that turned off so many of Kilmer’s peers inspired fierce loyalty in others. For years after Top Gun, Kilmer took playful potshots at Cruise (“you can’t make fun of [him]… poor thing”); in response, Cruise insisted on including Kilmer in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, which found Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky recast as a noble hero, albeit one stuck behind a desk in the throes of throat cancer. 

For a few minutes, the grace, dignity and gallows humour of Kilmer’s valedictory performance – the line readings achieved with the assistance of a vocal synthesiser – stops the movie’s gleaming ego parade dead in its tracks. When Cruise looks at him, there is real love. It’s wonderful that an actor apt to keep himself at arm’s length from an industry that never quite knew what to do with him spends his final moment on-screen wrapped up in a grateful and loving embrace.

• Val Kilmer, 31 December 1959 to 1 April 2025