Forgiveness of Val Kilmer, Hollywood's "Most Deranged Human Being," Comes in Documentary Form

It has been Batman, Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday; He starred in blockbusters like

Top Gun

and dazzled Cher, Cindy Crawford or Angelina Jolie. He was gorgeous, with an architecturally crafted jaw, great acting talent, and a refreshing lack of prejudice for going from comedy to drama, action, or science fiction. For more than a decade, Val Kilmer seemed poised to become Hollywood's most dazzling star, but there was always something to stop him. Almost always himself.

The executives had indulged his excesses until they found that there was a replacement for his goose that lays the golden eggs - there is a blonde with full lips at every Hollywood crossroads: Brad Pitt, for example, became a star shortly after him.

His characteristic off-color was unapologetic and anyone in the industry who had something to say about him opened their mouths.

It became clear in 1996, when a famous

Entertainment Weekly

article

,

viral before there was viral,

revealed all his outbursts.

And the one who was to be the king of the nineties ended up being known as

Psycho

Kilmer

(pun on

psycho killer,

psychopathic murderer in English).

This summer his figure has regained interest. The documentary

Val,

which premieres on August 6 on Amazon Prime Video, has been one of the surprises at Cannes. Kilmer has been filming for more than 40 years and the result is a feature film that ranges from his family tragedies to camera tests made by himself of films he never performed, including historical works such as

One of Ours

(Martin Scorsese, 1990) or

The Jacket metallic

(Stanley Kubrick, 1987). And even something that sounds distantly apologetic for his controversial character.

Val

is not the only project that brings you back to the present day.

In the fall, he will return to life as

Top Gun's

Iceman

, the character who made him a star in 1986. The inclusion of his character was quite a surprise, as big as Kelly McGillis, another talented and famous blonde beauty, would have been. As a complex actress who shared a shot with Cruise in the original, who disappeared from Hollywod in the prime of her career.

Cher and Val Kilmer at the 1982 Tony Awards.Walter McBride / Corbis via Getty Images

Fame was in his pursuit

Kilmer was born into a wealthy California family and at age 16 was admitted to the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. Just days before being admitted, his little brother drowned in the pool after suffering an epileptic seizure. Kilmer says it took years to recover from that. Juilliard helped him land roles in the theater, his first passion. "I'm a character actor, but I look like a leading man," he lamented in

The Guardian

in 2004. So it's funny that his film debut came with something as light as

Top Secret!

, the spy movie parody from the creators of

Land As You Can

. In his first role, he already made it clear that he had his own method of preparing: he recorded an album under the name of Nick Rivers (the name of the protagonist) and he persecuted the directors to explain the motivation of his character ... in a comedy so delirious that two men disguise themselves as cows with rubber boots.

Top Secret!

He showed that this newcomer was credible as a heartthrob, had a comical vision and a wonderful voice. And the industry took note. In his second film,

School of geniuses

, he was already the absolute protagonist. It was not a success, but it helped Tony Scott, the King Midas of action movies, claim it for

Top Gun

. In fact, Scott was the only one who wanted it: neither the producers nor Kilmer himself (who considered her to be "silly" and "warmongering") were very willing to collaborate. “I did not want the role. I didn't care about the movie. The story did not interest me, "wrote the actor in his memoir,

I'm Your Huckleberry

.

Scott promised to expand his role and Kilmer ended up accepting.

He got so into character that he took his rivalry with Cruise, initially something only present in the script, to the

filming

set

.

They never met off set.

His character was there to be the repulsive - and with hair - type that makes you value the protagonist more, but he ended up stealing the movie.

Was it possible to do so well as a cocoon without being it?

Hollywood would soon discover the answer.

Top Gun

would end up as a global cultural phenomenon that would gross more than $ 300 million.

Suddenly, as he told

The New York Times

in 2020, "fame was not my priority, but I had it."

Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's 'The Doors.' IFA Film / United Archives / Cordon Press

There has been much speculation about what went wrong in the career of a guy who had everything to succeed. Yes, he had a bad temper, but also many other great stars loved by audiences and producers. His next project,

Willow,

was a failure, but it allowed him to meet his wife, actress Joanne Whalley, and also for Oliver Stone to value him as the protagonist of his next project. And it wasn't just any movie: it was the life of Jim Morrison.

The project

The Doors

(1991) had been circulating in Hollywood for five years and to embody the leader of the band, the names of Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and even the singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence, had sounded.

But Kilmer had an advantage over them: the same kind of voice as Morrison.

And that was what convinced Stone, who found a man who approached work as savagely as he.

To prepare for the role, she lost weight and spent six months rehearsing songs from The Doors.

Some say that he also spent too many months in the same leather pants.

It was part of

the Kilmer method

, the same one that led him to ask the team to refer to him as "Jim."

Braggart, pretentious, irresistible

Critics did not support Stone's proposal, but they did support the protagonist. As

The Guardian

acknowledged

,

"Val Kilmer not only looks like Jim Morrison, but he also has his swaggering, goofy and pretentious arrogance." His performance was impeccable and he even sang most of the songs himself with a precision that caused even the band members themselves to distinguish his voice from Morrison's. Despite this, and to the surprise of many, the Oscars ignored him.

Alerts about Kilmer's character began to grow, although some were not known to the public until many years later. Actress Caitlin O'Heaney told

Buzzfeed News

in 2017 that the actor had assaulted her during an audition for the role. "When I got to the room, Val Kilmer picked me up, shook me and knocked me to the floor as he did so," he said. The

casting

director

, Risa Bramon Garcia, stated that the aggression was part of the scene that both were rehearsing and she was alerted to the intensity of that sequence. In any event, Kilmer and O'Heaney signed a confidentiality agreement and she received $ 24,500. Thus began to spread his reputation as an actor with a problematic character, but willing to go further than anyone to compose a character. Something that he demonstrated in his next great project,

Tombstone

(1993), where he played the legendary player Doc Holliday, who died in death throes, in 1887, of tuberculosis and alcoholism. To stage his final scenes, Kilmer dove into a bathtub filled with ice. His tremors are not interpretation, they are real. The Academy ignored him again.

Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne in 'Batman Forever.' Warner Bros. Pictures / Corbis via Getty Images

When Joel Schumacher took over

Batman Forever

(1995), taking the witness of Tim Burton in the saga of the bat man, Michael Keaton - protagonist until that moment - got out of the car and Kilmer entered the scene. By his account, he signed without reading the script. And Schumacher hired him without heeding the advice. "I had heard horror stories about Val and they warned me not to hire him," he says. "But I've heard that from a lot of talented people and I didn't have a problem." This time yes. After a fight motivated by the bad behavior of the actor with the team, he warned him that he would not tolerate it again. “Then he didn't speak to me for two weeks, which was a blessing. Kilmer is the most psychologically disturbed human being I have ever worked with, ”he later told the defunct US edition of

Premiere

film magazine

.

The story of why Kilmer did not put on the bat suit again takes on different nuances depending on who is telling it. Kilmer excused himself with the coincidence of dates of his new project,

El Santo

(1997), to force Warner to postpone filming. But Warner knew that the value is the suit, not the actor. And it didn't take long for the suit to adjust to a new body, that of a highly educated George Clooney.

That of

Batman Forever

it was not the last shoot in which he made his mark.

In

The Island of Doctor Moreau

(1996) everything started badly.

Kilmer had signed on to be the lead, but shortly before production started it seemed like too long a role and he ended up playing another character.

Although according to what transpired, once the clapperboard sounded, Kilmer recited the phrases that seemed to him, whether they belonged to his character or not.

It was not his only delusion.

He also burned the cheek of a team member with a cigarette.

"What kind of person would scorch a co-worker you spend 15 hours a day with, usually less than a foot away?"

wondered Taffy Brodesser-Akner in an article in

The New York Times

published last year. When the New Line production company learned how the project had gotten out of hand, it switched from director Richard Stanley to the much more seasoned John Frankenheimer. He didn't just have to deal with Kilmer, but also with the guy who had invented turning filming into a nightmare: Marlon Brando. Brando, whom Kilmer idolized, was somewhat contemptuous of him, but he gave him two good gifts, he left him his private island to spend their honeymoon with his wife and a phrase better than any of the script they had between them (“ Your problem is that you confuse your talent with the size of your paycheck ”). When the filming of an incomprehensible film ended and which, later, would mistreat critics and the public in equal parts, Frankenheimer exploded and after the

cut

The final yelled, "Now get this crap off my

set!"

And he reaffirmed himself with a maxim that surely many team members would have printed on their shirts.

"I will never climb Mount Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again."

Val Kilmer in a scene from 'The Island of Dr. Moreau.' New Line Cinema / Getty Images

End. End?

Kilmer ended up playing the role that had turned Roger Moore into James Bond,

The Saint.

Moore, in the television version that ITV aired between 1962 and 1969 of this spy story; Kilmer would do it in the film version. Again, it was not as successful as expected. Perhaps the fact that Kilmer spent the entire movie in ridiculous costumes played a part: if you star in one of the most handsome men in movies, don't cover his face. There were no second parts (more than the psychological suffered by a team that is rumored that the actor was forbidden to look into the eyes).

From there he continued to star in less and less ambitious films that allowed him to afford his dream, a ranch of more than two thousand five hundred hectares in Santa Fe. He also failed in that: in 2008 the financial crisis washed away his most precious property.

This ranch was loaded with meaning to Kilmer.

Among other reasons because there he had asked his wife to marry him.

When he was forced to sell the property for half its value, his marriage was only a memory.

The couple who had dazzled on the red carpets in the early nineties had been shattered.

At the end of their marriage they were so estranged that, according to what he told

Elle

magazine

,

he found out about the breakup from the CNN channel.

In love and in sickness

Joanne Whalley has been his only wife, but not the only star he has been associated with. Women like Daryl Hannah, Carly Simon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cindy Crawford, Drew Barrymore, Elisabeth Shue, Angelina Jolie - whom he described as "the most serious and most moving of all" - or Cher, his first ever sounded romance have passed through his life. and a great friend throughout her life. The Oscar winner for

Moonlight Spell,

who on People defined their relationship as "too intense and fiery," stood by his side at the worst moment of his life, when the throat cancer diagnosed in 2014 began to rage.

“Suddenly I woke up vomiting blood.

He covered the bed like in a scene from

The Godfather

”, he describes in his memoirs.

At that time the actor was at Cher's guest house, who was the one who called the ambulance and then - according to Kilmer sneeringly - tried to flirt with one of the doctors.

"We were joking about beauty and desire while I looked like a

Tarantino

Reservoir Dogs

stuntman

and my life seemed to be in mortal danger."

Val Kilmer at an event in Los Angeles in 2019, already after surgery to overcome his throat cancer.Amanda Edwards / Getty Images

A devotee of Christian Science, a religion that considers prayer the best method of healing, he initially followed the advice of his spiritual advisor and prayed. It was his sons, more devoted to traditional science, who forced him to resort to medicine. They performed a tracheostomy, received treatment, and the cancer subsided. But the throat operation deprived him of one of his most treasured gifts: his voice. "The instrument over which I had complete mastery is now out of my control," he laments in his memoirs.

"I have lived in the illusion almost as long as I have lived outside of it," he confesses at one point in his documentary.

"I have misbehaved.

I have behaved bravely.

I have been strange to some people.

I do not deny any of this and I do not regret it because I have lost but I have also found parts of myself that I never knew existed ”.

Top Gun: Maverick

will also be a good way to atone for those sins.

In 2021 a peaceful new episode may begin in the life of Hollywood's most troublesome actor.

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