'I think the nightmare's over'

Seeing Val Kilmer striding down Clapham High Street is disconcerting, as if a piece of Hollywood has dropped like a meteor from the sky. Burly and masculine in a black Umbro windcheater and baggy jeans, Kilmer is at nearby rehearsal rooms to work on his new West End play

Like A-listers before him, he is seizing the chance for redemption the West End offers the jaded star - one Kilmer could use more than most. Making Batman Forever the director, Joel Schumacher, said he was the 'most psychologically disturbed human being he'd ever worked with'.

The late John Frankenheimer, who directed him in The Island Of Dr Moreau declared, 'I will never climb Mount Everest and I will never work with Val Kilmer again.' Thus was born the psycho-Kilmer of myth, whom directors loved to destroy.

Today, however, he is disappointingly normal. He has given up his lunch hour for our interview, opens doors, is utterly polite, if detached. But then Kilmer, 45, is a decade on from that wrung-out, strung-out period when he was battling for inch-by-inch control on movie sets and in bloody combat with his British actress wife (now ex) Joanne Whalley. Their children, now 13 and 10, live with her in LA and spend weekends and holidays with him in his ranch in remote New Mexico.

'Yeah, I think the nightmare's over for me,' he says, scanning the menu in a local Spanish restaurant. 'I was mad at Rolling Stone for rehashing it last year. I said, "You know, one of the directors you quoted is dead, and another has publicly hated me for a decade. Why not talk to Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Tommy Lee Jones or Cate Blanchett" - all these people I worked with in the past couple of years.'

His voice is strangely flat and slow, as if his batteries are out. 'I mean, Bob Dylan likes me! He'd have given them a quote!' He pauses. 'Maybe not, but they didn't try!'

His notoriously self-centred, demanding behaviour suggested a child that had not grown up. Had he made a conscious effort to change? He gulps water, furtively catching my eye.

'Actually, critics have always been nice to me,' he says. 'It's just the crap that gotten included in general - that somehow I'm a problem. I also thought, naively, the studios would protect you. During a movie I made that I was really proud of, The Salton Sea, a story came out that I had thrown a bottle at my director.

But the scene was that my character threw a bottle. It upset me very much because I really liked the director, and what it intimated was quite creepy - it was a very violent, weird thing to do.'

He turns to a waiter, not making eye contact. 'I can't read the specials on the blackboard. What's it say? Chicken and ...?' The waiter scurries off to ask his colleagues. 'He could just go look,' he observes.

I ask if the West End is to kick-start his career. 'No, I just loved acting on stage more than I loved acting in movies,' he says. Of course, The Postman Always Rings Twice is typical of his sort of trademark dark roles - like Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Jim Morrison in The Doors or Iceman in Top Gun.