The Movies Val Kilmer Left Behind: ‘Top Gun,’ ‘Heat,’ ‘The Doors,’ and More

I probably first encountered Val Kilmer, who died on April 1, in the spy spoof Top Secret!, in which his pouty-angel beauty is used to shrewdly comic effect. Kilmer gets the joke on a deeper level, though. He’s a riot in the movie, as aware of his ironic casting as the behind schedule, great Leslie Nielsen was of his own in the Naked Gun movies.

It was valuable to meet Val Kilmer that way, as a silly guy having silly fun, because so much of what followed in his fascinating, varied career used his star appeal in a decidedly different fashion. Kilmer was perhaps most famed as the Aryan antagonist to Tom Cruise’s more genial fighter pilot in Top Gun, a role Kilmer would reprise nearly 30 years later in Top Gun: Maverick. Kilmer was also a one-time Batman, in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, a poncy pretty boy vexed by two freakish villains and a sexy psychiatrist played by Nicole Kidman.

Kilmer played a lot of unlikable people, which dovetailed neatly with an off-screen reputation for arduous behavior. He was known to clash with directors, to push opportunity away. But something of that haughty, overly principled demeanor is also what made him such an fascinating actor. When he went earnest, like in mostly forgotten dramas like At First Sight, he could fall flat. But in genre films that knew how to operate him, his weird strut had a beguiling effect.

Think of a ponytailed Kilmer firing a semiautomatic weapon down the canyon yawn of a downtown Los Angeles street in Michael Mann’s Heat. We don’t know too much about Kilmer’s character in that movie, but his assertion of criminal daring—an almost psychotic connection to the heist at hand—has a magnetic pull. There is something awfully startling about Kilmer, looking so lordly and disheveled at once, raging against order like that. He is an agent of mysterious chaos, felled but decidedly not forgotten.

Kilmer tapped into another kind of madness for the misbegotten period thriller The Ghost and the Darkness, in which he plays 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.

That was a hallmark, maybe, of Kilmer’s career. He bobbed when one would expect someone of his visage and profile to weave. The less said of The Saint and The Real McCoy—limp attempts at making Kilmer thoroughly mainstream—the better. But what a glorious, outsized figure he cuts in the cult favorite Western Tombstone. That movie was expected to be the loser in the battle against Kevin Costner’s far more earnest epic Wyatt Earp, and yet Tombstone has endured far longer, in no tiny part because of Kilmer’s kooky take on gunslinging dentist Doc Holliday. What fun it is to watch Kilmer play around in that semi-winking, half-stupid movie, appreciating the audience’s gaze and having some fun with the attention.

It’s that swaggering, oddball insouciance that makes him a memorable Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, a movie about a rock star whose legacy is mostly pinned on an untimely death. Kilmer looks the part, certainly, but he also nails the strut, the sort of doomed hubris that perhaps he and Morrison shared. (Not to mention the fact he sang the songs with so much assurance.) Few people regard The Doors as a seminal band anymore, but Morrison iconography endures partly because Val Kilmer enshrined that legacy with such preening authority.

I could write about Kilmer’s later work some—his amusing, near-cameo appearance in the SNL-based riot MacGruber, his sensitive silliness in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang—but I’d instead like to remember Kilmer for my favorite of his roles. In the towering, staggeringly lovely and sweeping animated film The Prince of Egypt, Kilmer voices a convincing and complicated Moses. He also voices God Himself, doing the massive lifting of playing both prophet and deliverer. Kilmer’s work in that great and underappreciated film perhaps best represents the behind schedule actor’s power, a mix of leading-man relatability and ridiculous grandiosity. I still love, all these years later, listening to Val Kilmer solemnly say, “Let my people go.” As I will always love diving back into his curious and singular filmography and remembering what it was to enjoy an actor who could be so vain and still selflessly save an entire people.