Val Kilmer names his two favourite roles of all time
Val Kilmer has earned a reputation as an actor’s actor. Despite some of the more embarrassing roles he’s played in films like Batman Forever, Kilmer remained just as interested in the art of filmmaking and the mechanics of telling a story as he did when he first began acting. And while an innate part of him might like to see a story unfold, Kilmer owes much of his upbringing to two of the greatest storytellers of decades past.
When talking about some of the best roles he has ever played, Kilmer’s first choice was Mark Twain in the project Citizen Twain. Kilmer had always been fascinated with Twain’s storytelling from an early age, often waxing poetic about the different avenues one could go down when crafting a story like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Although Kilmer had an affinity for Twain’s impact on pop culture, he was more interested in the man underneath the mile-high white hair. He told Vanity Fair: “Why Twain is so much fun to study—separately from his great literature—is that he was always concerned with truth and illusion. He was two different people. He had this character that he made up called Mark Twain, who is a shameless showman. He’ll do anything for money and anything for a laugh”.
While the road to playing Twain began in the theatre world, Kilmer didn’t mince words about how hard it was to inhabit the character. Despite the different character elements he brought to the performance, Kilmer knew that it wouldn’t be easy to play someone he thought was a genius, trying to sound smart while having his own reservations about how to deliver that kind of cadence.
Twain may have played a pivotal role in Kilmer’s life, but he also mentioned having a soft spot when he played Hamlet. Long before he started his acting career on screen, Kilmer always had an affinity for stage production more than anything else. Although he might have gone on to make blockbusters like Top Gun, Kilmer would consider himself at home whenever he was on a stage acting to the people directly. While speaking to Associated Press, he said: “You get tremendous feedback from a live audience that cannot compare from what you draw from a crew in a studio. On stage, you can find out in 30 seconds whether or not you are effective with your ideas. In a film, you have to wait for a year and a half”.
Seeing how his career unfolded after his time on stage, it’s easy to see how Kilmer refined the work of Shakespeare and Twain and turned them into magic on the silver screen. While Shakespeare’s productions have always relied on operatic performances, Twain’s work was always about the slice-of-life elements that go into making art.
From an acting perspective, both men live on different sides of the spectrum, and Kilmer taking on both at different points in his career illustrates more about where he’s come from as an actor. After playing Shakespeare in the 1980s, the gravitas that comes with those roles suited Kilmer well for Top Gun and The Doors.
By the time he was playing the role of Twain himself, Kilmer had left the glamorous side of Hollywood behind, intent on making the kind of movies that he was interested in making. Although Kilmer may have just been giving a standard answer about his career, both Hamlet and Citizen Twain show the growth that Kilmer has gone through as an actor: the kid who wanted to soak in the applause to the mild-mannered older actor that would let himself be vulnerable in front of his audience.
