The directors Val Kilmer always regretted turning down: “I won’t get another chance”
The biggest stars are always the most in demand, and while Val Kilmer was never truly an A-lister on the same calibre as peers like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, or Tom Hanks, he was a big enough name to spend his peak years fielding offers from the industry’s most notable directors.
If anything, the only thing that stopped Kilmer from becoming one of his era’s defining leading men was Kilmer himself. The actor’s hotheaded reputation for being difficult and frequent brushes with co-stars and filmmakers tarnished his reputation, gradually seeing his stock plummet from his 1990s heyday.
Still, his filmography boasts collaborations with Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, and Werner Herzog, among others, so his back catalogue is hardly lacking in auteurs. Then again, despite his insistence that he didn’t hold too many regrets, there remained a couple of names Kilmer constantly saw as the ones that got away.
Some of the roles he turned down over the years include Patrick Swayze’s star-making gig in Dirty Dancing, Washington’s part opposite Gene Hackman in Scott’s Crimson Tide, Clint Eastwood’s leading role in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire, Kevin Bacon’s Jack Swigert in Apollo 13, and Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
However, it was a role he rejected at the beginning of his career that stung harder than most after he knocked back the opportunity to play Ponyboy in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. He went one better by declining one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most influential filmmakers, Robert Altman, twice, something he openly admitted was a mistake he’d never be allowed to make again.
“You just don’t turn down certain directors,” he told The Independent. “You just don’t. And I didn’t realise how precious time is. I thought I could work with them again when I turned them down. I now realise I won’t get another chance.”
When his star was rising, Kilmer was well within his rights to believe that Coppola and Altman would circle back around and send another script his way. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case because he didn’t work under the five-time Academy Award-winning legend behind The Godfather or the subversive and satirical Nashville architect so much as once. Throw Lynch into the mix, and it’s a trifecta of heavy hitters he rued never being directed by.
Kilmer had a solid career that could have been spectacular if he didn’t keep getting in his own way, and for the most part, he wasn’t troubled by the what-ifs and the things that might have been. That said, over three decades after he’d rejected Coppola, Lynch, and Altman’s advances, he still couldn’t forget about it, indicating just how much he regretted it.
