Even if destiny didn’t quite turn out as he hoped, he’s not above signing autographs for Batman fans, or dressing up like Batman with his son playing the role of Robin in a playful clip. “Every boy dreams of becoming Batman,” he says of the superpower-free hero, “because it actually is possible to be him.” That Kilmer had just visited a bat cave in Africa when he got the call offering him the part made it feel like destiny.
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“It was frustrating until I realized that my role was just to show up and stand where I was told to.” But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about Batman since visiting the set of the Adam West TV show in the 1960s. “It was a struggle for me to get a performance past the suit,” he recalls. Kilmer doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about his experience playing Batman in the 1995 blockbuster Batman Forever, which ultimately left him feeling like as much a prop as an actor.
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His visit to the set of the Batman TV series as a child left a deep impression.
If it’s not always brutally frank about Kilmer’s past - his well-documented conflicts get reduced to a montage that includes Oprah Winfrey talking about his reputation for “perfectionism” - it’s unflinching about his present, offering a disarming and unexpectedly inspiring portrait of a man determined to fight past his troubles.
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Val alternates candid footage from the hours of footage Kilmer has shot since childhood with movie clips and scenes of present-day Kilmer making art, attending fan conventions, and hanging out with his grown son Jack (who supplies his father’s voiceover narration) and daughter Mercedes. Directed by Leo Scott and Ting Poo and written by Kilmer, Val is one product of those reflections. He’s responded by focusing on visual art, opening a Los Angeles gallery, and reflecting on his past. Cancer and its subsequent treatment has left him with a hole in his throat that makes him unable to speak except in a forced rasp. More recently, Kilmer’s life has been defined by struggle. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss”) and John Frankenheimer (“Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer”). I was forced to tell him that this would not be tolerated for one more second. In May of 1996, Entertainment Weekly ran an uncompromising article under the headline “Psycho Kilmer” that, amidst horror stories of bad behavior on set, served as a clearing house of rare on-the-record complaints from high-profile past collaborators like Joel Schumacher (“He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate. The skills served him well until his reputation for trouble started to make him a liability in spite of his proven box office appeal. Kilmer would happily take on the misfits. He could sell the broad-but-smart humor of Martha Coolidge’s cult classic Real Genius, make Top Gun’s Iceman seem like more than a cardboard heel, and give a dark romantic sheen to Tombstone’s doomed “Doc” Holliday. For the most successful stretch of his career, Kilmer became the guy you called when you wanted a movie star, but a movie star who seemed a little, well, off. In the new documentary Val, Kilmer dismisses Top Secret! as “fluff,” but the film set a pattern. To work, the absurd film needs an actor tuned into its weird frequency, one capable of playing it straight and looking like a Hollywood dreamboat but still able to sell the joke. in which he plays a handsome rock star recruited to go behind enemy lines in East Germany.
Kilmer made his debut as a leading man in the 1984 film Top Secret!, a send-up of spy movies, beach music, Elvis Presley, and World War II films. He burst into Hollywood looking like a classic movie star but seemed to have little interest in playing classic movie star roles. Val Kilmer has always been a contradiction.
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