The actor Val Kilmer called a “spoiled genius”
Although he enjoyed a stellar career, it’s not without merit to suggest that Val Kilmer could have become a much bigger star if he didn’t develop such a habit of getting in his own way.
His very first feature film appearance came in one of the funniest comedies of the 1980s when he headlined Top Secret! from the mad geniuses behind Airplane!, before prominent roles in box office success stories Top Gun and Willow elevated his career to an entirely different level.
Oliver Stone’s The Doors issued a powerful statement on his dramatic capabilities thanks to a transformative turn as Jim Morrison, before the double-whammy of superhero sequel Batman Forever and Michael Mann’s classic crime thriller Heat in 1995 pushed him closer than ever before to the upper echelons of the A-list.
Unfortunately, Kilmer’s reputation took a battering after he was tarred with the dreaded ‘difficult’ brush, whether it was getting into heated confrontations with Tom Sizemore on the set of Red Planet, creating a tense atmosphere on numerous productions, or just generally being painted as somebody with an immense amount of talent who couldn’t help but cause issues.
In what was an inevitability in hindsight, Kilmer being pitted against another well-known troublemaker was a disaster waiting to happen, which is exactly what ended up going down when he co-starred with Marlon Brando in the infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Original director Richard Stanley, who worked on the movie for a matter of days before being given his marching orders, said that “Val would arrive, and an argument would happen.” His replacement John Frankenheimer didn’t fare any better, and was even more forthright. “I don’t like Val Kilmer,” he said. “I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.”
Meanwhile, Brando was doing Brando things like refusing to come out of his trailer, not even bothering to learn his lines, and generally causing chaos. Unsurprisingly, there was plenty of tension between the two stars, but Kilmer wasn’t dissuaded from outlining his appreciation of the influence his one-time co-star held over the acting profession at large.
“I had attitudes that I learned and adopted that were easy to imagine in relation to the Marlon Brando school,” he said to Interview while reflecting on his approach. “Not even the acting behaviour, but the lifestyle, the attitude that the filmmaker doesn’t know what he’s doing, that you have contempt for everybody except a couple of people. Basically, spoiled. Brando was extremely talented, a genius, but he was also very spoiled.”
Of course, he couldn’t resist getting in at least a little dig, not that he’s one to talk when he and Brando were both equally detrimental to The Island of Dr. Moreau. They showed shared amounts of contempt to the cast and crew of the film, but this being Brando, Kilmer couldn’t help but salute his genius anyway.
