Val's back with a Bang Bang

Val Kilmer stars alongside Robert Downey Jr in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

10 April 2012

It's not so much that Val Kilmer has been off the Hollywood radar, rather that he has suffered too many blips to make him the industry's first choice. Now, at 45, the actor formerly known as "psycho-Kilmer" is determined to fix that.

He is ready to bury his difficult reputation, attend to his career and fulfil that early promise first noticed 19 years ago when he shot to fame in Top Gun. He shone as Tom Cruise's rival, Iceman, and few would have denied then that his star could have risen as high as Cruise's, if only he'd played the game. But he didn't.

Unperturbed he doesn't think it's too late to regain ground. "I'm going to be very disciplined now," he says. "There are a series of things you have to do to make yourself popular and stay in the public eye. Be on magazine covers, spend more time in Los Angeles. I never cultivated that kind of personality and there are no super-successful actors who haven't done that. I'm gonna do that now."

I have to admire the steely determination of the charming, candid man sitting in front of me, doing just that. He certainly looks older now than the wholesome tanned twentysomething hunk that was Iceman. His body is bulkier and his face has lost its youthful sharp edges, although his confident smile and rockstar pout are still in place.

He is dutifully giving an interview to talk about his latest movie, a very funny film noir called Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. In the movie (which borrows its title from legendary film critic Pauline Kael's famously snappy summation of American cinema), Kilmer plays a tough-guy private eye called Perry van Shrike.

It's set in contemporary Los Angeles, where Robert Downey Jr is petty thief Harry Lockhart, who has fluked his way into a screen test for a major movie. The producers hire Van Shrike to immerse Harry in the world of crime in preparation for his test.

The comedy here - and there is comedy, for Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is an unusually successful blend of laughs and hard-boiled noir intrigue - stems from the fact that Perry is gay. Kilmer has never been funnier, playing "Gay Perry" without camp or affectation. He's a tough, gun-toting private eye who talks about hot guys and even, once, locks lips with Harry.

The movie, which screens at the London Film Festival next week and is on release soon afterwards, follows Kilmer's summer on the West End stage. His comeback couldn't have been better planned if he'd tried. Out and about in London, between playing the adulterous Frank in the stage version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, he looked every bit the dignified Hollywood star.

He was photographed at all the right parties, smiling graciously at the camera, in marked contrast to Mickey Rourke's recent raucous appearances in the capital. While some critics praised Kilmer's quiet reinvention of the role that Jack Nicholson made so dangerous in the film, others found him lacking in sex appeal. But that didn't stop an army of swooning female fans trailing him around the city.

So what did Kilmer do so wrong that he's now trying so hard to put right? His reputation for eccentric behaviour on set, we'll come back to; his first mistake was to make some terrible career choices. He may have made almost 40 movies but he knows only too well that he has passed up some good opportunities.

"Tom Cruise and Sean Penn both sought out great actors and directors to work with, and I've never done that," he admits. "I turned down some big directors, and was very subjective and particular."

Incredibly, he refused lead roles in Dirty Dancing, Blue Velvet and Indecent
Proposal, and instead made the forgettable Willow, Kill Me Again and The Real McCoy. There is no denying he is a fine actor - he was sensational as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991) and a stand-out amid strong competition in Michael Mann's Heat (1995) - but most of his choices have been quirky, to say the least.

By the late Nineties, Kilmer had been in a string of turkeys - The Island of Dr Moreau, The Ghost and the Darkness, The Saint, Red Planet, At First Sight - which lent his career the whiff of potential never realised that has never gone away.

Aside from a supporting role to Colin Farrell's lead in Alexander, when Kilmer hit 40, he started taking smaller films such as Wonderland, Spartan and The Salton Sea, which showcased the nuances of his acting talents. "Problem is that when you do smaller movies, you can't get hired for the next James Bond," he says. "It's cost me a lot."

What also cost him were his well-publicised bust-ups with film-makers. In 1995, directing Kilmer as the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever, Joel Schumacher called him " the most psychologically troubled human being I've ever worked with".

The late, great John Frankenheimer, director of The Island of Dr Moreau, came to the same damning conclusion: "I don't like Val Kilmer, I don't like his work ethic and I don't ever want to be associated with him again." Kilmer has a reputation for immersing himself in his roles, and perhaps, in the past, he has gone too far. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang director Shane Black is forgiving - it's Kilmer's"
perfectionism", he says - while at the same time admitting that he can see how the actor's "intensity would be frightening".

"I think Oliver Stone was the first perbeing

son to use the word 'possessed', almost like an accusation," Kilmer says, "when I played Jim Morrison in The Doors. Jim always wore these leather pants and I was uncomfortable in them, so I wore them all the time because I had to look like I was comfortable in them. It was part of my job. I don't think I become the characters in my private life.

"The negative press about me was never to do with me being irresponsible," he goes on, more defensively. "I kind of

woke up one day to the

fact that I was accused of

something that I was not. I am much more conscientious now and I'm trying much harder to be more active about stopping negative press.

"I mean, there's never an accusation of me showing up late or not knowing my lines. I am just passionate about my work. I do think I'm more mature now and more confident as an actor, so I don't get as bothered now. The things I did then were out of fear or concern. How I would behave with the director or challenge my employers was always about the work."

KILMER had a privileged upbringing in California, where he found it easy to get into acting. "I went to a private school in Beverly Hills and we had an eighthgrade teacher who had an incredible gift for theatre. We would have people come and see our plays that didn't have kids in the school - the plays were that good. Then I went to a another school out in the Valley, Chatsworth High School, and we always won the festival awards. Kevin Spacey transferred there, too, so there was great talent around. Then I got into Juilliard, in New York, when I was 16 and that was just like a miracle. After that, I started straight off with a play that I had written about a West German terrorist; I didn't have to pay my dues like many actors do."

It can't have been quite as easy as he makes it sound, especially since, at the age of 17, he had to deal with the death of his brother, two years younger, who drowned in the family swimming pool.

He also faced divorce in 1996, from the English actress Joanne

Whalley, after seven years of marriage and the birth of two children (Mercedes is now 13, Jack seven).

Kilmer, who spends his free time on his ranch in New Mexico, says that he has never really been single until the past three years. "Who am I seeing?," he echoes my question. "No one. I'm lonely. Do you have any daughters?"

His affable, jokey manner is appealing. He is a relaxed, likeable man. But where does he go from here? His future is

probably not as the matinee idol he seems to crave - he's no spring chicken after all and his looks are fading. If he really wants to reinvent himself, he'd be better off settling for character actor - he would be the best in the business.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang screens at the London Film Festival on 28 October and opens on 11 November.

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