Val Kilmer, ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Batman Forever’ Star, Dies at 65

Kilmer’s movie career hit its zenith in the early 1990s as he made a name for himself as a dashing leading man, starring alongside Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton in 1993’s Tombstone, as Elvis’ ghost in True Romance and as a bank-robbing demolition expert in director Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

“While working with Val on Heat, I always marveled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character," Mann said in a statement Tuesday night.

Kilmer — who took part in the Method branch of Suzuki arts training — threw himself into parts. When he played Doc Holliday in Tombstone, he filled his bed with ice for the final scene to mimic the feeling of dying from tuberculosis. To play Morrison, he wore leather pants all the time, asked castmates and crew to only refer to him as Jim Morrison, and blasted The Doors for a year.

That intensity also gave Kilmer a reputation that he was difficult to work with, something he grudgingly agreed with later in life, but always defending himself by emphasizing art over commerce.

Val Kilmer as hotshot Navy pilot Lt. Tom "Iceman" Kazansky in the 1986 blockbuster "Top Gun." Kilmer wrote in his 2020 memoir "I'm Your Huckleberry" that he initially didn't want the part.

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“In an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors and other collaborators to honor the truth and essence of each project, an attempt to breathe Suzukian life into a myriad of Hollywood moments, I had been deemed difficult and alienated the head of every major studio,” he wrote in his memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry.

One of his more iconic roles — hotshot pilot Tom “Iceman” Kazansky opposite Tom Cruise — almost didn’t happen. Kilmer was courted by director Tony Scott for Top Gun but initially balked. “I didn’t want the part. I didn’t care about the film. The story didn’t interest me,” he wrote in his memoir. He agreed after being promised that his role would improve from the initial script. He would reprise the role in the film’s 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick.

One career nadir was playing Batman in Joel Schumacher’s goofy, garish Batman Forever with Nicole Kidman and opposite Chris O’Donnell‘s Robin — before George Clooney took up the mantle for 1997’s Batman & Robin and after Michael Keaton played the Dark Knight in 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns.

Janet Maslin in The New York Times said Kilmer was “hamstrung by the straight-man aspects of the role,” while Roger Ebert deadpanned that he was a “completely acceptable” substitute for Keaton. Kilmer, who was one and done as Batman, blamed much of his performance on the suit.

Kilmer, with "Batman Forever" costar Nicole Kidman, noted in the 2021 documentary "Val" that the Batman costume was restricting and isolating.

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“When you’re in it, you can barely move and people have to help you stand up and sit down,” Kilmer said in Val, in lines spoken by his son Jack, who voiced the part of his father in the film because of his inability to speak. “You also can’t hear anything and after a while people stop talking to you, it’s very isolating. It was a struggle for me to get a performance past the suit, and it was frustrating until I realized that my role in the film was just to show up and stand where I was told to."

His next projects were the film version of the 1960s TV series The Saint — fussily putting on wigs, accents and glasses — and The Island of Dr. Moreau with Marlon Brando, which became one of the decade’s most infamously cursed productions.

David Gregory’s 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, described a set that included a hurricane, Kilmer bullying director Richard Stanley, the firing of Stanley via fax (who sneaked back on set as an extra with a mask on) and extensive rewrites by Kilmer and Brando. The older actor told the younger at one point: “‘It’s a job now, Val. A lark. We’ll get through it.’ I was as sad as I’ve ever been on a set,” Kilmer wrote in his memoir.

In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story about Kilmer titled ″The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.″ The directors Schumacher and John Frankenheimer, who finished The Island of Dr. Moreau, said he was difficult. Frankenheimer said there were two things he would never do: ″Climb Mount Everest and work with Val Kilmer again.″

Other artists came to his defense, like D. J. Caruso, who directed Kilmer in The Salton Sea and said the actor simply liked to talk out scenes and enjoyed having a director’s attention.

Kilmer fully embraced the hard-rocking, leather-pants-wearing role of Jim Morrison in the 1991 film "The Doors."

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″Val needs to immerse himself in a character. I think what happened with directors like Frankenheimer and Schumacher is that Val would ask a lot of questions, and a guy like Schumacher would say, ‘You’re Batman! Just go do it,’″ Caruso told The New York Times in 2002.

After The Island of Dr. Moreau, the movies were smaller, like the David Mamet human-trafficking thriller Spartan; Joe the King in 1999, in which he played a paunchy, abusive alcoholic; and the doomed ’70s porn star John Holmes in 2003’s Wonderland. He also threw himself into his one-man stage show Citizen Twain, in which he played Mark Twain.

“I enjoy the depth and soul the piece has that Twain had for his fellow man and America,” Kilmer told Variety in 2018. "And the comedy that’s always so close to the surface, and how valuable his genius is for us today.”

Kilmer spent his formative years in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles. He attended Chatsworth High School alongside future Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and future Emmy winner Mare Winningham. At 17, he was the youngest drama student ever admitted at the Juilliard School in 1981.

Shortly after he left for Juilliard, his younger brother, 15-year-old Wesley, suffered an epileptic seizure in the family’s Jacuzzi and died on the way to the hospital. Wesley was an aspiring filmmaker when he died.

″I miss him and miss his things. I have his art up. I like to think about what he would have created. I’m still inspired by him,″ Kilmer told the Times.

While still at Juilliard, Kilmer co-wrote and appeared in the play How It All Began and later turned down a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders for the Broadway play, Slab Boys, alongside Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn.

Kilmer published two books of poetry (including My Edens After Burns) and was nominated for a Grammy in 2012 for spoken word album for The Mark of Zorro. He was also a visual artist and a lifelong Christian Scientist.

He dated Cher, married and divorced actor Joanne Whalley. He is survived by their two children, Mercedes and Jack.

“I have no regrets,” Kilmer told the AP in 2021. “I’ve witness and experienced miracles.