Our Huckleberry, Val Kilmer

In the original Top Gun, directed in 1986 by Tony Scott, naval aviators Maverick and Iceman were rivals. “Iceman had a smile that resembled a bite,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, but by the end, he would team up with Maverick, becoming his wingman, mentor, and ally. Decades later, Justin Chang wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Val Kilmer haunts Top Gun: Maverick from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive . . . In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his costar has never stopped trying to sell.”

Kilmer, who died last Tuesday at the age of sixty-five, had been grappling with human vincibility since his 2015 diagnosis. In 2020, he wrote a memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, and the following year, he contributed narration—spoken by his son, Jack Kilmer—as well as home movies and behind-the-scenes footage he’d been shooting all of his working life to another telling of his story, Val, a documentary directed by Leo Scott and Ting Poo.

In both the book and the movie, Kilmer owned up to his reputation as “a hyper-opinionated pain in the ass on set,” as Alex Pappademus put it in a profile for Men’s Health. In a piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine at around the same time, late in the spring of 2020, Kilmer spoke with Taffy Brodesser-Akner about separating in his mind the cancer, which he insisted he never had—“I blinked a few times,” admits Brodesser-Akner—and the treatment, which he blamed for the loss of his voice.

Kilmer was raised a Christian Scientist by parents who divorced when he was nine. At seventeen, he became one of the youngest aspiring actors to enroll at Juilliard. Still in his early twenties, he appeared in a 1983 off-Broadway production of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys with Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker, the team behind the 1980 smash comedy Airplane!, caught the show and asked him to audition for the lead role in their next project, Top Secret! (1984). As David Zucker recalls in the Hollywood Reporter, “this kid somehow knew where the joke was,” and they cast him as Nick Rivers, a rock star who becomes entangled in Cold War–era international intrigue.

“If you want to see how smart and fast, how this-dude-has-got-it-all Val Kilmer was as a young actor,” writes Owen Gleiberman, “just check out Real Genius, the 1985 geek-chic comedy directed by Martha Coolidge that’s one of the under-seen gems of the decade. He plays a science wizard at Pacific Tech who becomes the mentor to a fifteen-year-old prodigy, and Kilmer glides through the movie like an elfin jock in fuzzy animal slippers . . . The entire performance is a loop of spinning sarcasm that expresses, in early form, Kilmer’s distrust of the stardom that was about to come to him.”

It came with Top Gun, which Kilmer followed up on with turns in Ron Howard’s Willow (1988) and John Dahl’s Kill Me Again (1989). He then “pulled off something nearly impossible in his portrayal of sultry rock shaman Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991),” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Kilmer’s performance is like a perfume, a conjuring of unnamable moods: muskiness on the rumpled sheets of a hotel bed, the welcoming heat of late-afternoon sunlight, the whorls of dusky paint on an eighteenth-century masterpiece in a gilt frame. The spirit of Morrison was all of those things; Kilmer brought it to life onscreen. He also did his own singing for the role, not so much mimicking Morrison’s velvety tone and snaky phrasing as pouring it, like a sorcerer’s elixir, from his soul.”

A few movies later, Kilmer gave us an indelible Doc Holliday, the dentist, gambler, and gunslinger who reunites with an old friend, Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp, in Tombstone (1993), ostensibly directed by George P. Cosmatos, though both Russell and Kilmer later claimed that it was Russell who called the shots. “Kilmer affected a syrupy way of speaking that was seductive but also vaguely threatening,” writes Esther Zuckerman in the New York Times. “Holliday is suffering from tuberculosis and often drunk, but instead of wobbling with intoxication and disease, Kilmer is oddly still. It makes him entrancing and also somehow unnerving.”

Notorious outlaw Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) threatens to gun down Wyatt twice in Tombstone, and both times, Doc emerges from the shadows and utters the line that gave Kilmer the title of his memoir: “I’m your huckleberry.” Like Samuel L. Jackson’s recitations of Ezekiel 25:17 in Pulp Fiction, this killer’s signature phrase, cool as it most definitely is, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to contemporary ears. But by the mid-nineteenth century, “I’m your huckleberry” had come to mean: I’m the one you’re looking for, the guy for the task at hand.

After a brief turn as Elvis Presley in director Tony Scott and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance (1993), Kilmer landed the lead in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995), facing off against Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face and Jim Carrey’s Riddler while falling for Dr. Chase Meridian, a psychologist played by Nicole Kidman. “It was not the best ’90s movie, but it may have been the most ’90s movie,” suggests Marc Tracy in the NYT.

Batman Forever was the juggernaut at the box office that summer, and six months later, Kilmer appeared as Chris, the right-hand man to Robert De Niro’s professional thief in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). “There’s no other performance exactly like it in his body of work, nothing quite as intensely natural and human,” writes Scout Tafoya at RogerEbert.com. “In one shot he lets himself into his palatial ranch home, stretches like a cat to kiss his wife Ashley Judd, all beautiful and plush. Within seconds they’re arguing and he’s demanding she leave him if she’s so unhappy, leaping over furniture to punctuate his tirade. He’s scary in that moment. His ferocity will re-emerge during the celebrated bank job in the middle of the movie; no thinking, just instinct. It’s his best work on film. He later giddily confessed he ‘loved every minute of it.’”

The following year brought two oddities. The Island of Dr. Moreau was ultimately directed by John Frankenheimer after screenwriter Richard Stanley was booted off the chaotic set where Kilmer butted heads with his idol, Marlon Brando. The Ghost and the Darkness, written by William Goldman and directed by Stephen Hopkins, was a “misbegotten period thriller,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, featuring Kilmer as “a proud colonialist dealing with a killer lion in Africa. His is the straight-man role to Michael Douglas’s flinty mercenary hunter, but Kilmer finds a glimmer of something alluringly absurd in the blander role. He’s sweaty and accented and pulsating along with the movie’s strange energy. It’s a movie-star turn in a movie that is asking someone else to be the movie star.”

Lawson’s favorite Kilmer performance, though, is actually a twofer, the voices of both Moses and God in the animated DreamWorks production The Prince of Egypt (1998). “Kilmer’s work in that great and underappreciated film perhaps best represents the late actor’s power, a mix of leading man relatability and ridiculous grandiosity,” writes Lawson.

Kilmer played Willem de Kooning in Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000) and porn star John Holmes in James Cox’s Wonderland (2003) before appearing alongside Robert Downey Jr. in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). In 2020, Downey suggested that this comedic neonoir remained “in some ways the best film I’ve ever done,” and playing private investigator “Gay” Perry van Shrike, Kilmer “made past-peak look downright enviable,” writes Jesse Hassenger for GQ.

But memorable roles were thinning out. Kilmer appeared with Nicolas Cage in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and he took the lead in Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (2011), playing a horror writer visited by ghosts in his dreams—and making up for the time way back in 1983 when Kilmer had turned down a role in Coppola’s The Outsiders because he was already committed to perform Shakespeare on the stage. In 2013, Kilmer took a small role as a stoner dad in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto, starring Emma Roberts and Jack Kilmer, Val’s son. Then there was a flicker of Jim Morrison’s ghost glimpsed in Kilmer’s brief performance as a rocker in Terrence Malick’s Song to Song (2017).

“Today,” writes Abe Beame for GQ, “our celebrities strain to appear normal and ‘like us’ in spite of being hot rich aliens who play make-believe for a living. Kilmer made no bones about the fact that he was Val Kilmer and we were not . . . Being famous makes you crazy but you had the impression Kilmer came fully-formed, that he was like this when we met him. He was drunk and he was erratic and he said weird things and did weird things and he lived on a big weird ranch in the desert, as was his birthright, and he was also smart and sensitive and occasionally said incredibly profound things, and it all came from a place of open, vulnerable honesty. He wasn’t hiding anything from us.”