Val Kilmer could have been the next Tom Cruise – but he was too interesting

Telegraph

02-04-2025

Perhaps the most inadvertently telling phase of Val Kilmer's career was that short-lived period in the mid-1990s in which Hollywood tried to turn him into a conventional leading man. Casting Kilmer as Bruce Wayne in 1995's Batman Forever looked at the time like the snakelike supporting star of Top Gun and Tombstone had been given a fast pass to the front of the A list.
Then came 1997's The Saint, in which he played a glossy revival of the suave master thief Simon Templar, previously portrayed by Roger Moore, and the wholesome vocal role of Moses in DreamWorks Animation's The Prince of Egypt.
But even though he was amply equipped with the beauty for it – his pillowy pout was so 90s-luxe-glamour it was almost obscene – the gear shift to Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise status didn't stick. Partly it was because Kilmer, who died yesterday at the age of 65, was at the time a notorious nightmare to work with. 'Even if I was making The Val Kilmer Story I wouldn't hire that prick,' John Frankenheimer is said to have told his assistant director on the unhappy set of 1996's The Island of Doctor Moreau.
But it was also because he was too dangerous, too prickly, and just too straightforwardly interesting for the job. On screen he exuded a soft cruelty and sensuality that made his characters the last men we wanted to root for, but couldn't take our eyes off nonetheless. While watching Batman Forever as a 13-year-old I remember being semi-hypnotised in the cinema by his lisping delivery of the line 'Tell me doctor, do you like the circus?' Here was a man trying to chat up Nicole Kidman with the tamest date suggestion imaginable, but intentionally or otherwise, Kilmer gave it the velvety mouthfeel of a veiled threat.
That's the DNA strand that ran through many of Kilmer's greatest roles: they were all leading men in their own minds. Top Gun's Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky, the bleached and rippling ace pilot slash locker-room bully; Tombstone's tippling, tuberculotic Doc Holliday; Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's hilariously abrasive Gay Perry, Willow's swashbuckling braggart Madmartigan (playing opposite wife Joanne Whalley) – to each of these characters, the plot of the film they appeared in seemed like a distraction which only pulled focus from the thing that really mattered: him.
Perhaps attitude and billing aligned only once in Kilmer's career – in his extraordinary, woozily embodied performance as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors. Kilmer's portrayal of the 1960s rock frontman may be the single least likeable lead turn in the history of biopics: he's conceited, pampered, pretentious, destructive, invariably wrecked on a cocktail of substances, and without any obvious talent for music. On its release in 1991, many fans of The Doors loathed it, as did the band themselves.
'It was not about Jim Morrison,' said keyboardist Ray Manzarek, played in the film by Kyle MacLachlan, in an interview shortly after the premiere. 'God, where was the sensitive poet and the funny guy? The guy I knew was not on that screen.' Well, fair enough. But who'd want to watch Kilmer play him?
Kilmer thrived on screen as a problem for others to solve, especially rival pack alphas – so it should come as no surprise that his greatest performance was in one of the growliest big-beast ensembles ever recruited. As the professional thief Chris Sheherlis in Michael Mann's Heat he was a knot of contradictions: hyper-capable on the job, at the right hand side of Robert De Niro's Neil Macauley, and bone-chillingly ruthless in the film's masterful centrepiece shootout in Los Angeles' concrete canyons.
But he was also addicted to the rush of the job and the high-stakes gambling that would invariably ensue after a payday, while his explosive temper causes untold strife in his marriage to Ashley Judd's Charlene – though with a near-imperceptible wave of her hand it is Charlene who enables his escape from the LAPD during the supremely tense final act. Both Judd and Kilmer's performances in this moment are sensational, as both understatedly come to terms with this wrenching fork in the road in their lives within a handful of seconds.
After spending much of the last 20 years out of the spotlight, not least due to his own worsening health, Kilmer's screen career ended on an impossibly perfect note with the converging of another split path. In 2022 he was reunited with Cruise in a moving scene in Top Gun: Maverick, when the two old airmen reconnect and reminisce. In the scene, Cruise looks supernaturally bright-eyed and youthful; swathed in a scarf, Kilmer is older and more weathered, but his earlier beauty still endures.
'It's time to let go,' reads Iceman's poignant message to Maverick: from an actor who never trafficked in sentimentality, there could have been no better final swerve of renegade truculence than bringing a multi-generational audience to tears.