Val Kilmer Breaks On Through to the Other Side

Who cares if the Californian film star was hard to work with. Failure is a much better story than success.

I met Val Kilmer in May, 2005. I’d just started my job as a senior editor at Harper’s Bazaar (still called Harper’s and Queen at that time) and I was sent to interview him in a penthouse he’d been put up in while he rehearsed for the West End play, The Postman Always Rings Twice. The play became a famous movie starring Jack Nicolson in 1981. It’s about the murderous passion between a drifter and a diner waitress in the Californian desert. I’d first met Val a few days previously at a party my magazine had thrown for him. Other guests included Brooke Shields, in town to play Roxy in Chicago and David Schwimmer, in town to play in Neil LaButte’s black comedy Some Girls. Tracey Emin was there too. She told me how she’d met Val in some mystery location a while back. “Val’s like a snowball for friends. That’s why he’s so fat!” she exclaimed. “Wherever you are in the world, someone knows Val. I’ll be naked at the gym and someone will come up to me and go, ‘You know Val Kilmer, don’t you?’”

Val knew how to act at a party. He was soon showing us his rock and roll method of drinking loads of vodka without showing yourself up (order a vodka cranberry and a vodka tonic and then when nobody’s looking, pour them into the same glass.) But he later confessed that being on the London stage was more scary to him than a night in the Viper Room. “I could be here for seven weeks, I could be for three months,” he shrugged. “It depends if they like me….”

He’d intended to play Frank the drifter as “a mix of Bob Dylan, Tom Waites and a young Christopher Walken,” but things didn’t work out like that. The Guardian’s theatre critic of the time, Lyn Gardner reckoned Kilmer had “all the stage presence of a damp tea towel” and the play only ran for 10 weeks. But all of this hadn’t happened yet and I didn’t really care about the play. When I went to Kilmer’s penthouse overlooking the Thames for a proper sit-down interview, I was mainly interested in knowing how a person dealt with being a world famous movie star. It was a memorable occasion. Writers sometimes describe famous people as being “down to earth,” and Kilmer was sort of that. Mainly he was kind of bumbling around, being “Californian” as I now know this vague state of mind to be. The Los Angeles-born actor wasn’t interested in being polished (not like the boring interview I did with Beyoncé a few years later.) He was more concerned about the pigeon that had flown into the window of his penthouse than he was at trying to impress a journalist who might help resurrect his career.

You take my breath away: or not. Val Kilmer’s tonsil tennis in The Postman Always Rings Twice at the London Playhouse in 2005 wasn’t for everyone.

Good old Val, with his arresting bone structure which bore witness to his Cherokee heritage, he was clearly on his uppers. He’d had a lot of flops since the glory days of playing Jim Morrison in The Doors movie of 1991. He was struggling with his weight (the director of The Postman… had issued him with a “diet chart”) and he badly needed a hit. And yet I loved how his favorite accolade about his favorite people was that they were either “weird” or “crazy.”

As I began to read the tributes and obituaries to Val Kilmer today, I suddenly remembered that day in the London penthouse, twenty years ago in May of 2005. I’ve pasted the ensuing article below. I also remembered something an Elvis impersonator in Vegas once told me. He told me that failure makes a better story than success. He loved that Elvis had squandered his talent because “to me that’s attractive. That’s human. If someone said to me, ‘Do you want to meet the young Marlon Brando or the Marlon Brando at the end all bloated?’ I’d rather sit down and talk to the bloated Marlon Brando. That’s way more interesting than a guy at the top of his game.”

Rest in peace, Val Kilmer. You made your mark.

British Harpers and Queen magazine - July 2005

What Lies Beneath

One minute dark and brooding, the next boyishly exuberant. Val Kilmer is not your typical Hollywood big-budget actor. We meet the star and explore the mystery below the mellow surface.

It’s hard to read Val Kilmer from his imposing glass and steel penthouse overlooking the Thames because he’s only lived here for a week. Still, there are clues lying around about the man who once called himself “The only actor Hollywood hasn’t figured out yet.” There’s the duck statue on the running machine, the newly-purchased paintbrushes and water colours on the coffee table, the Arsenal mugs, the book of Bob Dylan lyrics, the map of his ranch in wildest New Mexico and the three skateboards. The pigeon and the plate of muesli on one of the side balconies seem like they might be significant. The pigeon flew into the window the day before and injured itself. Now it refuses to fly away. “I think his eye is getting better,” Kilmer speculates, strolling to the window to check out the situation.

The muesli is supposed to be for Val, but you suspect he’s not into it as much as the bird is. Pinned next to a sheet of directions to the RSC Clapham rehearsal rooms where he goes every day to figure out how to play the drifter Frank Chambers in the West End production of The Postman Always Rings Twice is a diet chart. Muesli figures largely. “Breakfast: small bowl of muesli w/yogurt or skim milk. Small glass OJ.” Also on the chart are things like: “Eliptical trainer. Level 3. 50 RPM 5 mins. Level 5. 50 RPM 5 minutes.” At the bottom of the page it says: “Popcorn or egg white late at night if you must.”

The play opens in a month but Val isn’t getting too stressed out about the whole diet thing. “Yeah,’ he drawls about the stack of carrots and bags of spinach I can see stacked up in the fridge when he opens to door to get out the milk, “I guess I didn’t unpack the juicer yet though.”

He talks as if he’s just woken up from a deep afternoon nap and he hasn’t quite come to grips with reality yet. He talks, he hesitates, he digresses, he chuckles. When he’s made the Lapsang Souchong we go out to the terrace and he looks down at the Thames. “I like rivers,’ he says, staring mesmerised at the muddy waters. “They’re…quiet.”

When you ask him how he got to be so mellow, how come he acts like a go-with-the flow hippie who’s smoked a ton of weed, he jokes that he’s a Californian and that’s what they’re like. “Remember!’ he exclaims, his face lighting up. Then he falls silent and turns serious and he finally says, “I live in the wilderness… you know?”

You presume he’s talking about his beloved ranch near Santa Fe in New Mexico, and yet you can’t help thinking of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now whose immersion in the wilderness sent him off onto another planet. Brando was a friend of his and he describes him as a “crazy, sensitive, odd guy” - “weird” and “crazy” being the biggest accolades Kilmer can give anyone. Yet there’s also something about Kilmer’s arch delivery that reminds you of Jack Nicolson in, say, Witches of Eastwick (“I only know him to say hi to at parties”) and also some kind of hippie, cosmic surfer dude, not unlike Jim Morrison in the film – The Doors - that catapulted him into the limelight back in 1991.

Kilmer with former wife, British actress Joanne Whalley on the set of mobster thriller, Kill Me Again (1989) one year into their marriage.

But that’s the thing about good actors. They can be a myriad of different people. They have to be hollow men because their job is to soak up other people’s lives. Right now, Val is trying to crawl into the head of Frank Chambers, the character Nicolson made famous in the 1981 movie The Postman Always Rings Twice (there was also a 1946 version staring Lana Turner and John Garfield – tagline: “Their love was a flame that destroyed!”). The spare, steamy tale was originally a novel by Depression-era writer James M Cain and is said to have inspired Camus’ The Stranger. The story revolves around a drifter, Frank Chambers, who turns up at a roadside diner in the middle of the Californian desert, falls in lust with the owner’s wife, Cora, to such a degree that the pair decide to kill the husband.

You can see Kilmer’s gripped by the part. He’s sitting down now on his penthouse terrace, flicking manically through the novel. “Frank’s not a grifter, he’s not a con man,” he enthuses. “What would you call him today? Basically he’s just a happy bum. He doesn’t need much. But he’s hungry, he’s gotta eat...”

He says the book inspired him even more than the Nicolson movie. ‘Kane has some strange observations that are really fun. Weird phrases. There’s one line I want to put in the play. Here it is: “I kissed her . Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.”

He throws himself back in his chair with a gleam in his eye. He adds that the play is fundamentally about eroticism and violence and if this London version is to work, he and his leading lady, Charlotte Emmerson, must be able to recreate the kind of passion that would lead to murder. He’s realised though that different eras have different definitions of passion. In the 1934 novel, Frank’s and Cora’s getting-off scene is described in the following manner:

I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers.

Bite me! Bite me!

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Val’s not sure how that will translate to the 21^st century. “See, that’s kind of hard to do on stage…you know, you’ve got stage blood and stuff…it would look kind of…” He shrugs.

He looks out onto the Thames again to think some more about this and you can see that this is classic Kilmer. Joel Schumacher, who directed him in "Batman Forever," recalls the actor as "one of the most psychologically troubled people I've ever worked with.” And certainly, Val has experienced pain. His younger brother Wesley drowned in a swimming pool in 1977 and admits he didn’t really “get back to earth” for two or three years afterwards.

He says that negative things people have said about him being difficult to work with have hurt him. (The truth seems to be that he’s simply a committed method actor. When he played a man in search of his wife’s murderer in 2002’s The Salton Sea, he befriended a crystal meth addict who was also a police informant and videotaped him during a three-hour interview while the informant was high on the drug.)

Still, he confesses he’s become hardened as he’s become older. He’s 45 now. And he certainly doesn’t regret his career mistakes - the fact that after successes like Top Gun, The Doors or Batman Forever he should have gone immediately on to do more blockbuster roles. “Yeah, I err…I never got around to…I…I had so much fun...”

His name is often linked with that of fellow scientologist, Tom Cruise. Both actors made it big in Top Gun (where Kilmer nearly upstaged him as the cocky pilot Iceman) yet Cruise made the right decisions. Career-wise at any rate. Kilmer is self-consciously polite as he talks about him. “Working with him was…fine.” He adds tactfully, “He’s quite… committed to his success.”

Flying high: Kilmer as Iceman against Tom Cruise’s Maverick in Top Gun, one of the biggest box office hits of the 1980s

Kilmer’s last piece of work, playing Moses in a critically panned musical about the ten commandments in LA, was, he says, as much about being able to take his kids - from his ex-wife, the British actress Joanne Whaley- to school locally every day, as anything else.

He suddenly breaks out into a smile, throws his hands up into the air and exclaims, “acting’s great, it’s such a goof!” And that’s the thing; Kilmer can do fun and light as well as dark and ponderous. He was initially attracted to acting as a kid because it was fun to show off to a captive audience at one of his real estate father’s ranches. When he starts talking about how he got the leading role in The Doors movie it’s incredible - and very entertaining –how his mind shoots off into baroque meandering mode. The narration begins with a description of a fantastic Oscar party, passes through an encounter with Daniel Day Lewis who was also up for the part (Kilmer thought him “odd - like Morrison, very intense. I don’t think he’s too comfortable in crowds”) and then segues into a punch line about Bob Dylan being a freak. “Everyone was excited cos Bob Dylan was coming to the party. And he finally arrived wearing this hoodie and gloves. Like a crazy man..!”

There’s that ‘crazy’ word again.

“…And so Bob’s over in the corner with shades on and I was thinking, you know… no one would talk to him, they were too shy. It was uncomfortable. So I was, like, someone ought to go, like, bail Bob out. So I went half way over and - really loud on this giant porch full of movie stars - said, ‘Hey Bob- you an Yma Sumac fan?’ And he said, “Yes I am!”’

He and Dylan hung out after that. Dylan apparently liked the psychotic dentist figure Doc Holliday that Kilmer plays in Tombstone. He muses some more on how being “weird” is the best way to get world weary people interested in you. “I just thought, Who’s the weirdest person that Bob Dylan might know?’ (Sumac is a Peruvian singer from the ‘50s famous for being able to sing higher than a bird and lower than a man).

He then comes to the weirdness of Marlon Brando, who he knew even before they worked together in The Island of Dr Moreau. He talks about him in the present tense. “What comes to mind is him being crazy. We were in Australia and his daughter had just killed herself and the French had just blown up an atom bomb under water next to Tahiti, so he was talking to the French prime minister, talking to the Tahitian government – he talked five or six languages while he was on the phone… I was getting divorced at the time so he was very caring. He talked quite a bit about that and listened very well…”

Bomb: The Island of Dr Moreau with Marlon Brando (left) is regarded as one of the biggest movie flops of the 1990s.

He’s coy about his current love interests. He has a few cute lines about playing alongside Angelina Jolie in Alexander, about what a great, hard-working person she is, etc. But he’s at his best when he’s being self-deprecating about his abilities with women. He tells of the time he was doing nightlife research for The Doors in LA and a Guns and Roses fan came over and started to talk to him. “She told me she was a nurse who worked in the emergency ward. So my friends started laughing because they know what’s going to come. She’s like, ‘tonight there was a motorcycle accident.’ and she described the people who came in with no arms and bleeding to death – which of course made me sick. So I had to stumble out of the club. It was a kind of a Morrisonian moment, actually...’

The clouds come back and Kilmer is back in his “wilderness” head. “Great people I’ve met – Brando, Mandela, this woman in New Mexico called Mary Gavin who’s 90 years old - they just seem to have an unusual capacity to love humanity. Their observations about life, the way they care is really exceptional. So I’ve been trying to consciously be devoted to those qualities. Just try to be like them… I’m 45 now and why not...give it a shot, you know?” He breaks out in a small laugh.

Ever the anti-actor, Kilmer is a kind of John Travolta who hasn’t yet been rescued and rehabilitated by a Quentin Tarantino. He’s looking forward to his comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang coming out in the autumn where he plays a gay detective in LA alongside fellow Hollywood renegade, Robert Downey Jr.

Red Carpet reunion: Kilmer poses with his friend, Al Pacino in 2019. The pair starred together in Heat in 1995.

“You have to do penance in Hollywood,” he says. “Like, I’m doing big budget penance right now. I did comedy penance for a while. They won’t let you do a comedy unless you’ve just done a comedy. It’s a catch 22. This one happened by accident.”

He says he’s going to carry on with the gut-instinct method of navigating his way through life – a process he terms, “the personal way.” He shrugs, drawling, “Hollywood loves a come-back story.”