“Never met him”: when Val Kilmer went so method his co-stars didn’t know who he was
The debate over the supposed merits of method acting is one that has gone on consistently in Hollywood for some time now. Undoubtedly, it can inspire some memorable performances, but, as Val Kilmer discovered, it can sometimes make an entire cast and crew either hate you or not even realise you were on the film set in the first place.
The actors who subscribe to method are well documented. Robert De Niro is one, getting a New York taxi driver’s license and cabbing on Manhattan’s streets in order to play Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Daniel Day-Lewis is another, insisting on being in a wheelchair for the entirety of making My Left Foot, asking the crew to feed him with a spoon, which sounds interminable, let’s be honest.
And Val Kilmer was another big industry name who believed entirely in completely inhabiting a character while filming. For the Oliver Stone rock biopic The Doors in 1991, for instance, he wanted to be so convincing as legendary frontman Jim Morrison that he demanded everyone on set call him ‘Jim’, learned all the lyrics to 50 of the band’s songs, and eventually had to go to therapy after filming finished in order to re-remember who he was.
And things didn’t get much better on his next movie, 1993’s Tombstone, which co-starred Bill Paxton and Kurt Russell and was an action-packed western telling the story of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the OK Corral, where Russell played Earp and Kilmer his close confidant Doc Holliday, a part that the actor went so hard on, that for a climactic death scene, he required that the crew fill a bed with ice in order to simulate the discomfort of having tuberculosis.
While that kind of effort helped his performance go down pretty well with the critics, it was rather less popular with the other actors on the film, like The Terminator star Michael Biehn, who had actually originally pitched to play Holliday himself, but ended up as Johnny Ringo, a supporting character and member of the same gang. Although he was open to getting to know Kilmer while making the film, that reaching out was not apparently reciprocated.
Biehn recalled the making of Tombstone to The Hollywood Reporter, explaining, “People ask me what it’s like to work with Val Kilmer. I don’t know. Never met him. Never shook his hand. I know Doc Holliday, but I don’t know [Kilmer].”
A closer look at what else Kilmer did on set while playing Holliday possibly explains why. Not only would he refuse to take off his heavy wool costume between takes despite the blazing Arizona heat, but his obsession with ice also went as far as him packing his mouth with the stuff in order to numb his tongue and slur his speech.
Kilmer also spent weeks studying recordings of how Southern US aristocrats spoke in the 19th century, working closely with a dialogue coach, pairing it with deliberately slow, pained movements, and to give him his due, it probably paid off.
While Tombstone didn’t pick up any industry awards, it did fare well at the box office, making a $50million profit on a budget of $25m. More than 30 years on, it is seen as one of the better-made modern western movies, although it pales in comparison to another movie made just a year beforehand, Clint Eastwood’s towering Unforgiven from 1992 starring Gene Hackman.
