“The force of his will is the thing I remember about him,” says Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who wrote a profile of Val Kilmer for The New York Times Magazine in May 2020. “He was sure he was going to come back to his exact former self. ”The two met for an interview just as a lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic seemed all but certain to happen.Mr. Kilmer, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and had undergone a tracheotomy, was still performing. Mr. Brodesser-Akner credits him with providing “the first whiff of overarching hope and positivity that I’d witnessed in I couldn’t remember how many months.”“What does somebody do when the thing that they are known for, which is being a superhero, which is being an action hero, which is being handsome, which is being this sort of picture of good health and vigor, what do you do next?” she said. “And a lot of people, they fade away. But that’s not how it went for Val. ”Mr. Kilmer, who played classic roles such as Batman and Iceman in “Top Gun,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who is Val Kilmer and why is he significant?
I had been trying to write a Val Kilmer story for years, and he would never say yes to it. And finally, he said yes. I don't know why I was so lucky to have him say yes at that moment, but I know what he would say. I know that he would say that it wasn't luck, that it was my faith. These people, you write about them. And you become associated with them forever.
And you don't even know what a privilege that's going to be years and years later. I'm Taffy Brodesser-Eckner, and I'm a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. The actor Val Kilmer... Died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 65. And for the Sunday Read this week, we are once again airing the profile I wrote of Val in 2020 during a pandemic.
Everyone has a favorite Val Kilmer that feels very personal and specific to them. In Top Gun, in Heat, in The Doors, in Batman Forever. He was the kind of actor who was always running from his good looks, even as he greatly benefited from them. I could not believe his jaw when I met him, same as I couldn't believe it in a movie theater when I was 12 years old.
In 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and he chose not to treat it medically, but through prayer and counseling on his faith. He was a Christian scientist. Eventually, his children begged him to seek medical intervention, and he finally did, And when I met him, he had had a tracheostomy. He was speaking by covering up the hole in his throat, and he was still performing.
What does somebody do when the thing that they are known for, which is being a superhero, which is being an action hero, which is being handsome, which is being this sort of picture of good health and vigor, What do you do next? And a lot of people, they fade away. But that's not how it went for Val.
All of the vocal exercises he'd learned at Juilliard had come in handy because he was able to figure out how to speak again in a way that he should not have been able to communicate. But he was. And the force of his will is the thing I remember about him.
The force of his will, the fact that he was sure he was going to come back to his exact former self, and in some senses felt that he was, that he was all soul and all will. And very often throughout the pandemic, when I would feel despair, despair, I would think that somewhere Val Kilmer is sitting with a hole in his throat and he does not see despair. He sees the opportunity for faith.
And one of my best friends called me up and said that she had throat cancer. And I was with Val Kilmer the next day and I said to him, my best friend has throat cancer. And he said, tell her she shouldn't worry. And I included this in the story. And sometimes people still ask me about it. And people will ask once again now that this story is going out into the world again.
And I want to tell you all that Lydia is fine now. And this morning, the first call I made was to her to tell her that he had died. And we were so sad together. All I could think about is the fact that maybe I think about him more than anyone else I've ever written about. I'm so sorry he's gone.
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Chapter 2: How did Val Kilmer's career evolve over the years?
The lesson here is Val Kilmer's perpetual lesson, that if you have enough faith, if you can take the long view and remember that things will work out, destiny takes over. I say that to prepare you for the story of what happened to his body.
Because if you think that turning the story of a blown up career into a best case scenario is impressive, wait till you see what the Val Kilmer Story Optimizer does with cancer. So. By 2014, he was living a life he loved. He was no longer under contract for franchises he couldn't put his heart into.
He had some money, he had a place in Malibu, his kids nearby, and he could finally do what he wanted. He began to pick the projects that mattered to him. It so happens that the animated short Mark Twain Dreams of the Resurrection is not the first movie Kilmer has made about Mark Twain.
It's not even the second, and I've heard there's an additional screenplay for a feature-length script out there, too. But the main Mark Twain event is a film called Citizen Twain, and it was conceived as a live performance in which Val Kilmer dresses up as Mark Twain and does Mark Twain and Christian science-related stand-up comedy. Take a minute with that sentence.
I went to see Citizen Twain one rainy Friday night at the College of Staten Island, a half-filled theater which I remember a little like a fever dream.
There's not a lot of marketing copy that can prepare you for its strangeness, and also its elaborateness, and also its sincerity, and also the delightful warmth of Val Kilmer, whom you will never see happier than when he is presenting this film of his—
Though it started out as a half-filmed, half-live performance, it is now, in light of his vocal condition, a totally filmed performance that Kilmer merely introduces. The subjects of Citizen Twain range from sarsaparilla to congressional representatives being idiots, from Mark Twain quotes to Mrs. Eddy quotes to quotes Val Kilmer only wishes either of them had said.
Here he was, using his celebrity and his talent, along with some heavy rubber prosthetics — Mark Twain was many things, but he was not a person who looked like Val Kilmer — to finally do something he wanted, which was to work out for himself the relationship of two people he absolutely worshipped, but who were at odds in almost every way.
Samuel Clemens was a Christian and a rational man who seemed fairly appalled at Mrs. Eddy's interpretation of the Bible and its assumptions that healing from illness was something resulting from prayer rather than medical treatment. He wrote a book about it called Christian Science, in which he clearly mocks all of it. But Kilmer believes he did this only because he was so drawn to it.
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