For anyone who grew up watching movies in the 1980s, Val Kilmer was something of an anomaly among the young Hollywood actors whose careers blew up during that decade.
Compared to Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Emilio Estevez, Robert Downey Jr., John Cusack or Tom Hanks, to name a handful of stars who emerged back then, Kilmer was not exactly a strapping action hero nor a smooth heartbreak kid. Nor did he come across as a brooding Method-style thespian, or as someone who could provide instant comic relief on screen.
In some ways Kilmer was all of these things at once, and therefore unclassifiable. He was mostly a great character actor with the looks of a leading man, capable of melting into roles that almost invariably had an edge to them.
His most memorable films, including Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone and Heat, were popular hits in which the actor managed to maintain, to various degrees, his own eccentricity. With his blond locks and prominent jawline, Kilmer may have looked like he just crawled out of a wetsuit in Malibu, but he conveyed something else in his movies: an uneasiness and vulnerability that belied his suave physique.
Like many kids from my generation, I first discovered him as Nick Rivers, the Elvis-style singer turned international agent in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spy spoof, Top Secret! It wasn’t exactly the classiest debuting role for an actor who had trained at Juilliard and dreamed of playing Hamlet, but Kilmer went all-in on a character who was the brunt of countless one-liners and slapstick gags. He was so straight-faced and committed in so many crazy scenes, the comedy worked even better.
That’s the trait that probably stuck most to an actor who hit his peak, at least in terms of box office appeal, a decade later. Kilmer was always all-in on any role, to the point that he developed a reputation for being a perfectionist who could be difficult to work with.
But he also couldn’t be easily categorized like lots of other stars of his day. When he went for those coveted big-ticket parts, such as replacing Michael Keaton to play the Caped Crusader in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, he loathed the experience and refused to repeat it. (This despite the fact that the Warner Bros. blockbuster was the number one movie of 1995, beating out Toy Story.)
His defining role — one he disappeared so far into that it was often hard to distinguish the actor from the real thing — was portraying Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, The Doors. Like Timothée Chalamet did for last year’s A Complete Unknown, Kilmer spent a good year studying Morrison, learning to perfectly mimic his voice — original recordings of the band were combined with the actor’s own vocals — as well as his drug-addled antics on and off the stage. (Unlike Chalamet, Kilmer didn’t get an Oscar nomination for all his hard work, walking away with only an MTV Movie Award nom.)
Morrison remains the character that felt closest to Kilmer himself — a performer with incredible magnetism and sex appeal, but also an oddball with a real dark side. (In Kilmer’s case, that was caused in part by the traumatic death of his younger brother, Wesley, in 1977.) When the singer chants “I am the lizard king, I can do anything” in the movie, not only do you believe it, but you believe that Kilmer believed it in real life.
It was perhaps that mystical, slightly unhinged part of his personality that prevented him from reaching the blockbuster heights of Cruise or Hanks, although it’s also what made him seem more authentic than so many other stars.
He could also play things straighter, whether it was Doc Holliday (another famous eccentric) in Tombstone or Chris Shiherlis, the love-torn bank robber in Michael Mann’s Heat. Or a whole series of character types in Phillip Noyce’s continent-hopping, identity-shifting thriller, The Saint.
But more often than not, and especially as his career carried on past its ‘90s heyday, you would often see Kilmer in roles memorable for a certain brand of outlandishness: the wacko private eye Gay Perry in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; the detective partner of an even nuttier Nicolas Cage in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; a pothead dad in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto; an obsessed writer in over his head in Francis Ford Coppola’s off-the-wall horror flick, Twixt.
Kilmer leant gravitas to these parts, no matter how weird some of them were. Again, he was all-in, and even if he had few successes in the latter half of his career, it was always a pleasure to see him pop up in a movie, bringing his own brew of charisma and craziness. “People are strange,” as Morrison famously sang, and Kilmer seemed almost to take that as a motto in the later decades of his screen career.
His last great “performance,” and one absolutely worth a look, was in the documentary Val, which was made after the actor had survived throat cancer surgery and treatment. Composed mostly from footage Kilmer had begun shooting on video when he was a teenager, including behind-the-scenes tidbits from Top Gun and the ill-fated The Island of Dr. Moreau — a notoriously insane production where Kilmer may have been the sanest person on set — the movie chronicles the actor’s fast rise to stardom, plus all that happened afterward.
It also gives us heartbreaking glimpses into his life following operations that reduced him to a diminished physical state and forced him to speak through a breathing tube. While many actors wouldn’t want to be seen publicly in such a condition, Kilmer continued to get out among his fans as much as possible, signing autographs at conventions and presenting screenings of his best movies. Even when it looks like he can barely stand, he still has the old charm — that wry smile with a shred of wickedness, that flash of the bizarre.
In an industry that’s always thrived on phoniness, Kilmer may have suffered at times for being too much himself, no matter how hard he would try to vanish into certain roles. If he never became an icon on the level of his ‘80s counterparts, he did become that rare thing: an actor whose originality made us see past his killer looks.
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