When Val Kilmer burned a cameraman with a lit cigarette: “The guy was upset, naturally”
Everyone loves reading salacious stories about movie stars misbehaving on set. After all, these people are usually paid millions of dollars to play make-believe, and because stars can be a coddled, flighty bunch, sometimes they begin believing their own hype, and sparks begin to fly. In the 1990s, Val Kilmer was the poster boy for these ego-driven antics, and he single-handedly turned the industry against him in the process.
In truth, the stories of Kilmer’s difficult tendencies in that decade have been well covered, so here are some potted highlights. He aggravated his Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher so much that they got into a physical shoving match, resulting in two weeks of not speaking to each other, which Schumacher dubbed “bliss”. He became so furious with The Real McCoy director Russell Mulcahy that he fired a prop gun at a nearby vehicle. Oh, and there was the time he ate a live locust in front of Kevin Jarre, the original director of Tombstone.
“There’s a dark side to Val that I don’t feel comfortable talking about,” Jarre told Entertainment Weekly in 1996. However, he did feel able to talk about the day a stand-in found an unusually coloured locust on set, which Kilmer quickly snatched from his hand and stuffed in his mouth. He ate the giant bug while Jarre watched in horror, before allegedly saying, “As you know, I have a reputation for being difficult. But only with stupid people.”
While some supporters of the star tried to play off his behaviour as the stress-induced outbursts of a man under a lot of pressure, and suffering from personal problems, including a failing marriage, Kilmer’s own brother offered a different explanation. “We all have grandiose, narcissistic tendencies,” Mark Kilmer mused. “If there are people helping those tendencies along, it’s hard to resist.”
However, having a propensity for narcissism and throwing tantrums when you don’t get your way is one thing, whereas actively committing violence on unsuspecting crew members is entirely another. One of the most inexcusable things Kilmer was said to have done in the ’90s came during the filming of The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the most cursed productions in Hollywood history. Amid a merry-go-round of hired and fired directors, actors switching roles midway through production, and inclement weather destroying sets left, right, and centre, Kilmer supposedly burned a cameraman on the face with a lit cigarette.
“Val was sort of teasing him with the end of his cigarette and burned this guy’s sideburn,” executive producer Tim Zinnemann claimed. “The guy was upset, naturally.”
While some tried to excuse the incident as a practical joke that went horribly awry, an anonymous witness to the incident insisted Kilmer knew exactly what he was doing. “He burned that cameraman right on his face,” the witness alleged, “And no, he wasn’t fooling around. It was intentional. He did apologise to the crew.”
It’s hard to defend this incident, even after Kilmer’s untimely death in April 2025, when an outpouring of love correctly identified him as one of the most interesting Hollywood leading men of his day. In the end, the most that can be gleaned from his ’90s behaviour is that Kilmer may have been a self-destructive soul at best, and an arrogant jerk who bought into his star status far too much at worst.
Really, it’s no wonder John Frankenheimer, the director of Doctor Moreau, had the following response when Kilmer mused, “You know what I think?” while shooting a pivotal scene: “I don’t give a fuck. Get off my set.”
