VAL KILMER 1959-2025 - Remembering a Rebel

THE TOP GUN ACTOR REACHED THE HEIGHTS OF HOLLYWOOD STARDOM-BUT HE WAS A TRUE ORIGINAL WHO TREASURED HIS OWN INDOMITABLE SPIRIT ABOVE FAME.

- TOM GLIATTO

Reporting for his first professional acting job at age 13, Val Kilmer already knew one thing: He would refuse to compromise his artist’s soul—and certainly not for a cheeseburger ad. Especially when it wasn’t even a good cheeseburger. “The thing tasted like cardboard,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir I’m Your Huckleberry. “The director kept telling me to put my heart into it. I couldn’t.... I walked off the set and never appeared in the commercial and never got paid.”

Even though he balked at having to wade into what he referred to as “a sea of Hollywood fluff,” Kilmer, who died from pneumonia at age 65 in L.A. on April 1, was a Hollywood star and an irresistible sex symbol. The camera loved the flinty angularity of his jaw, the slope of his nose, the perfect bow shape of his upper lip. In the 1980s and ’90s he gave iconic performances as Tom Cruise’s cocky rival Iceman in Top Gun (1986), the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever (1995) and Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991). He didn’t always enjoy the ride—“Fame wasn’t my priority,” he said—and he earned a reputation for being a challenge on-set: Batman director Joel Schumacher described him as “the most psychologically troubled human being I’ve ever worked with.”

Then, around 2015, when he was in his mid-50s, throat cancer robbed him of his voice. Yet he made a courageous and touching return in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. “Tom wouldn’t make Maverick without him,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “He knew how important Val was.” The public response to his five-minute scene with Cruise, in which his few whispered lines of dialogue were enhanced by software, was deeply heartening to Kilmer. He seemed ready for a comeback, if on his own idiosyncratic terms. “My dream,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “is to play