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Perth Now
31-05-2025
- Sport
- Perth Now
Police issue statement as ‘disgusting' MCG fight vision emerges
Video of a MCG crowd fight after the clash between Hawthorn and Collingwood has gone viral and caught the attention of police. The incident was posted on X (formerly Twitter) and has had (at the time of writing) almost 200,000 views. Police have since revealed there were a number of 'behavioural issues' during the game on Friday night and 10 people were evicted. The official crowd number was 83,706 and fans witnessed a polished performance from ladder leaders Collingwood, who brushed aside Hawthorn to the tune of 51 points. 'Police were generally pleased with the crowd behaviour at the MCG for Friday night's AFL match,' Victoria Police said in a statement. 'There were a small number of behavioural issues with 10 people evicted from the stadium by police. 'Officers are aware of a fight which broke out following an altercation between a small group about 10.30pm. 'A 32-year-old man advised police that he was assaulted but did not wish to make a statement at that time. 'The man was not injured during the incident.' The incident happened behind the goals where the Hawthorn cheer squad was sitting. Credit: X It is unclear who started the fight. Credit: X The vision shows a fan — thought to be a Collingwood supporter — being grabbed by three Hawthorn supporters. It is captioned: 'Hawthorn fans taking the loss well then,' but it is unclear how it started. The incident happened behind the goals where the Hawthorn cheer squad was seated, near the steps. The vision shows security staff arriving. A fan said: 'I witnessed this with my family (kids). It was awful.' Social media account The Saint said crowd fights had become way too common at AFL games and it was time to separate rival supporters. 'We don't need this. It happens every week. It's not even surprising to see it anymore,' they said. 'It's getting out of control. People can't wait to throw punches at rival footy fans these days. It's awful. 'Just have fans sitting among their own supporters instead of this. So much better.' Another fan said: 'I remember a time when fighting was rare at an Aussie Rules game.'
The Independent
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Val Kilmer was handsome, charismatic and difficult to work with – but he was worth it
Val Kilmer, who has died at the age of 65, spent his career at war with himself. Fame was a burden. Success was a chore. He masked his face as Batman, disguised it in The Saint, surrounded it with a halo of unruly curls as Jim Morrison. In True Romance, he is Christian Slater's id – a devil-on-his-shoulder who speaks and moves like Elvis – and mostly off-camera. You see his neck. His chest. His face through a blurry reflection in a mirror. What was a Val Kilmer role without a degree of subterfuge to it? But it meant that when you did see him – once he dropped the pout, the mystery and the brooding stoicism – it would feel revelatory. Think back to the crushing devastation of his last scene in Heat, when he realises he'll never see his wife again. His smile droops, his eyes are suddenly moist. Or what about that gum-smacking grin of his in Top Gun. Or the heartwarming vulnerability of his return in Top Gun: Maverick 36 years later, his voice dimmed by his real-life throat cancer, but that twinkle intact, that cocky swagger, those sharp cheekbones that could still do damage. What a strange movie star Val Kilmer was. He was handsome, charismatic, difficult. Always a bit of a kook. He filmed himself on a camcorder constantly, footage of which made up the bulk of a documentary about him released in 2021, called Val. Appropriately, Val was more of a mosaic of Kilmer than an excavation of his psyche. Even in a film about his life, he maintained his strange obscurity: a man with peculiar creative tastes blessed (cursed?) with the looks of a God; a Christian Scientist in his private life; an ex of Cher's; an actor who seemed to get the most artistic pleasure out of the one-man show he wrote, directed and starred in, as the folksy humourist Mark Twain. Ticket holders would enter each venue Kilmer played to find the actor reclining in the stalls in old-age make-up, white fright wig and mustache. He'd make his way up to the stage, riffing on faith, mortality, the act of acting. Over the course of his 90-minute monologue, he'd slowly remove his prosthetics until he once again resembled Val Kilmer. He seemed, in the best and worst senses of the word, exhausting. He was a Method actor and mischief-maker, both nice ways of saying that a litany of filmmakers couldn't stand him. On the set of 1995's Batman Forever, one of his ill-fated attempts at name-above-the-title film stardom, he would show up late covered in blankets, clash with the crew, and say his lines so quietly that no one could hear them. 'The two weeks where he didn't speak to me [were] bliss,' its director Joel Schumacher once said. On The Island of Dr Moreau a year later, actors were so incensed by Kilmer's surly behaviour that they'd ring up their agents begging to quit the film. Marlon Brando reportedly threw Kilmer's phone in a bush and told him that he'd confused the size of his salary for the size of his talent. 'I don't like Val Kilmer, I don't like his work ethic, and I don't want to be associated with him ever again,' said the film's director John Frankenheimer. Kilmer tended to gloss over these incidents. He'd speak obtusely about them, with language so flowery that it'd take you a minute to realise he'd said nothing at all. 'In an unflinching attempt to empower directors, actors and other collaborators to honour 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 2020 memoir. Kilmer was a Juilliard-trained actor crammed into films he, early on at least, deemed beneath him. 'I was insecure and competitive when I was younger,' he said in 2017. 'I wanted to be loved for my Hamlet while I waited in line for my decaf, not [hear] 'Hey, Iceman!'' He turned down Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders – which made stars of Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Matt Dillon – to appear in a Broadway play, and spent years disliking Top Gun as he worried it glorified the military. Many of the films he desperately wanted to star in – Goodfellas and Full Metal Jacket, most notably – were ones he didn't get. Those he fought for and did get were directed by men who seemed to match his odd mix of slick, cocksure madness. When Oliver Stone dithered over casting him in The Doors, Kilmer spent thousands of dollars of his own money to fund an elaborate, multi-scene audition reel in full Jim Morrison drag that he shot in his Laurel Canyon home. Stone gave him the part. Ultimately, he was so convincing as Morrison – dropping to his exact weight and learning to sing 50 songs by The Doors despite only needing to sing 15 for the film – that the band's surviving members admitted that they couldn't tell the difference between Morrison and Kilmer's singing voices. It wasn't that Kilmer eventually found a sanctuary in serious independent films – most of his career was spent, by and large, inside the studio system – but the erratic quality of his career did prove a blessing in disguise. He was an actor who always seemed to be making comebacks, the ambiguity of his movie stardom meaning that every sudden reappearance felt like an arrival. His performance as the porn star John Holmes in 2003's Wonderland drew raves ('it proves once again what a marvellous actor we have in Val Kilmer,' went critic John Patterson), likewise when he played a gay detective in 2005's neo-noir comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. 'Kilmer displays a rich comedic sensibility he should deploy more often,' went The Hollywood Reporter. It was easy to forget about Kilmer, then see him in something, then spend the immediate aftermath questioning why he wasn't in absolutely everything. In a review of Terrence Malick's wacky 2017 Hollywood tapestry Song to Song, the Variety critic Peter Debruge wrote: 'There's a very funny bit with Val Kilmer playing a rebellious old rocker who takes a chainsaw to his speakers mid-set – why not make a movie about him?' Despite his restlessness and penchant for chaos, Kilmer was undeniably talented, a man whose artistic and existential battles played out on screen, on set, and concurrent with his enormous, unasked-for fame. For many who worked with him, the noise was ultimately worth it – if only for those glimpses of something extraordinary once it had quieted down. 'I didn't say Val was difficult to work with, I said he was psychotic,' Joel Schumacher joked in 2020. 'But he was a fabulous Batman.'
The Independent
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Val Kilmer Forever: How the actor turned out to be a superhero in real life too
I thought Val Kilmer was a superhero from the first time I laid eyes on him. He was my first big-screen Batman, stirring some note of excitement in my soul that had remained untroubled by Adam West's shark-repellent-bat-spray-wielding TV version. I was nine years old when Batman Forever arrived in cinemas, which was probably exactly the right age to be awed by its schlocky, larger-than-life charms. There was Tommy Lee Jones, seething as the terrifying Two-Face, Jim Carrey stealing scenes as the demented Riddler, and, at the heart of it all, there was Val himself, a superhero who looked like a matinee idol. At least he did when you could see his face. As Kilmer once remarked to the Orlando Sentinel: 'Really, in that Batsuit, it wasn't so much about acting except with your nostrils.' At the time, it would never even have occurred to me that Kilmer – who died yesterday at the age of 65 – wasn't having the time of his life strutting around in black rubber and flaring his nostrils at Nicole Kidman. In Leo Scott and Ting Po's 2021 documentary Val, which was born out of thousands of hours of home video, Kilmer revealed that starring in Joel Schumacher's comic book romp left him feeling like little more than a tiny cog in a giant machine. He had always seen himself making high art – he went to Juilliard after all – and years earlier had turned up his nose at Top Gun 's 'silly script', before being contractually obliged to play Iceman. He had no such obligation with Batman, though, so he turned down reprising the role for Batman & Robin, passing the poisoned cape to George Clooney, and made The Saint instead. If, by some unlikely turn of events, I had been a child career adviser to Kilmer at this point, I'd have told him to make exactly that move. The Saint was even cooler than Batman. Based on a literary series by Leslie Charteris, The Saint had already been turned into a TV show in the Sixties starring Roger Moore, so naturally it was expected to provide Kilmer with his James Bond role. Here was a different type of superhero for him to embody: suave, sophisticated and with the top half of his face entirely unobscured. Things did not work out as planned. Kilmer's Simon Templar is apparently a master of disguise, but the outlandish costumes and not-great accents just don't really work in the context of a film trying to play things straight. (It didn't help that Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out in the same year, 1997, spoofing the sorts of films The Saint was indebted to and making it appear even more old-hat by comparison.) What had once been talked about as Kilmer's chance for his own globe-trotting franchise turned out to be his final appearance as a leading man. He would still do great work – notably in Shane Black's superb black comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, wherein sparks fly whenever he verbally spars with co-star Robert Downey Jr – but some of his drive had clearly left him. Kilmer had built a reputation for being prepared to go further for a role than any other actor working. That reputation was waning. Several years ago, I spoke to Oliver Stone about casting Kilmer as Jim Morrison in 1991's The Doors. 'He chased me down,' Stone told me. 'He'd wanted to be in Platoon but he was impossible. During the auditions he was so out there. He was sort of eccentric. There are a lot of eccentric actors, but he was really out there. He did a strange audition for Elias [the character eventually played by Willem Dafoe]. He shot his own audition. He was lying on a table doing his kind of, you know, Jim Morrison imitation. It wasn't right at all for that movie, because he wasn't military. Then when The Doors happened, again he popped up in my life and he'd already prepared a tape.' Kilmer's portrayal of Morrison was one of the most remarkable performances of his career. Not only does he pull off looking like the Lizard King, he even sounds exactly like him – Stone estimated that of the Doors songs on the film's soundtrack, 40 per cent of the vocals are Morrison's while 60 per cent are Kilmer's. Stone also recalled that, true to his recalcitrant reputation, Kilmer proved difficult to work with. 'Of course Val, being of an extravagant mentality, would melodramatise his fatigue [from singing],' remembered Stone. 'That drove everyone a little bit crazy. He had so many massages. The massage bill on that film was enormous. $20,000, at least, in massages. For a big guy, and strong-looking, he wasn't that strong. He started looking tired.' By 2014, Kilmer's film career had taken a backseat to his fanboy-ish love of Mark Twain. While on tour with his one-man show, Citizen Twain, in Nashville, he found a huge lump in his throat. He could barely swallow. He was diagnosed with throat cancer and went through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The cancer ravaged his vocal cords and stole his voice, leaving him speaking, breathing and eating through a tracheostomy tube. 'The sound is something between a squeak and a voiceless roar,' observed New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner when she interviewed Kilmer in 2020. 'He says the fact that I can understand him is a result of the endless vocal exercises that he was trained to do when he went to Juilliard after high school, that he was taught to work his voice 'like it was a trumpet'.' It would have been easy for Kilmer to retreat from public view at that point; he had blockbuster money, after all. But he continued to work, both onscreen (including a small but profoundly moving part in 2021's Top Gun: Maverick) and off – maintaining HelMel, an art gallery and studio in Hollywood. He remained devoted to his dream of bringing his version of a Mark Twain biopic to the big screen, with Cinema Twain, a filmed version of his live show, being released in 2019. And then there was Val, a a precious piece of self-reflection, offering revealing and holistic insight into the man behind the celebrity. In his final years, Kilmer found a way to open up about his life, his victories and his defeats, despite cancer's cruel attempts to rob him of his voice. If that's not a superhero, I don't know what is.
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Val Kilmer could have been the next Tom Cruise – but he was too interesting
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.
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Val Kilmer: an ethereally handsome actor who evolved into droll self-awareness
Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black's comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man. He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell to Val Kilmer's Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can't have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell. In the mid-90s, Kilmer had a real shot at mainstream stardom. He took over from Michael Keaton in the role of the caped crusader in Batman Forever, a film which performed very respectably at the box office but which was received coolly by the critics on the grounds of its sunnier, goofier style, closer to the 60s TV show. This was in an era when superhero movies did not cultivate the Comic Con fanbase in the way they do now, although it is not clear that DC fans would have taken Val Kilmer to their hearts. Kilmer also played Simon Templar in The Saint, the classy sub-Bond caper made famous on the British small screen by the young Roger Moore. To this, the reaction was a resounding meh. Kilmer however made a powerful, even stunning impression in other roles. He was an almost ethereally handsome hero in Willow in 1988, a fantasy adventure planted in relatively stony soil (this being an era before Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones made fantasy a big important genre). A frustrating non-breakthrough came three years later when he was cast in the difficult, unlucky role of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, but the director encouraged an interpretation heavy on the preeningly self-destructive and unsympathetic 'legend' of Morrison, the iconic rock star heading for an obese drug-addled crisis; the American life with no second act. In George P Cosmatos's acclaimed western Tombstone in 1993, Kilmer got respect for his performance as the tubercular gunslinger, drinker, womaniser and card-player Doc Holliday, and almost stole the picture from Russell as Wyatt Earp. It was the Holliday performance which got him his chance at superhero glory. Kilmer also played a supporting role in the classic Michael Mann action thriller Heat in 1995 as Chris Shiherlis, an armed crew member working for the legendary villain Neil MacCauley, played by Robert De Niro. Here, sadly, Kilmer had no opportunity to upstage the main players Pacino and De Niro, whose alpha-gorilla face-off is epitomised by the great coffee-shop scene. Could Kilmer have taken either of those two leads? Well, it was not to be. Anyone wanting to see the very best of Kilmer should get hold of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and thrill to his wonderfully funny, seductive performance as Perry, the LA dude in gorgeous suits who is sexier and savvier than anyone else on screen: gay or straight, law-breaking or law-abiding. He even managed to make his fleshiness look sensual, with a droll and witty self-awareness. In his autumn years, and all too briefly, Kilmer showed us his real star quality.
