Val Kilmer died a year ago on April 1, 2025, at 65, and the tributes came in really fast. Tom Cruise said he was “floored.” The internet mourned. People posted clips of Tombstone and Top Gun on socials in celebration of the actor and his work. By most accounts, it was a very respectful send-off for one of the most popular actors of the ’80s and ’90s. And then his Conspiracy director, Adam Marcus, opened his mouth.
Marcus, who worked with him on the 2008 thriller, posted on Threads this week calling Kilmer the “worst human being I’ve ever known,” adding that “if this guy did one-tenth of what he did on my set today, he would have been cancelled in a blink.” He tagged his post with his #MicroIntellectMonday series.
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The comment section was clearly taken aback. One person wrote, “It’s really big of you to say something like this after he’s dead and completely unable to respond.” Another asked, “What did he do? If you’re posting this you might as well bring the receipts.” Someone else asked what everyone was thinking, but too afraid to say: “So the rumours of his behaviour were true?”
Unfortunately, yes, the rumours were very true.
Director Joel Schumacher cast Kilmer as Batman in 1995’s Batman Forever despite being warned off by people in the industry. He gave Kilmer the benefit of the doubt. Schumacher later said he almost immediately regretted it. “He was being irrational and ballistic with the first AD, the cameraman, the costume people,” Schumacher recalled. The two went two full weeks without speaking to each other. Schumacher described those two weeks as “bliss.” Kilmer didn’t come back for Batman and Robin. Schumacher put it plainly: “He sort of quit; we sort of fired him. It probably depends on who’s telling the story.”
On The Island of Dr. Moreau, director John Frankenheimer had a more direct take: “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.” Kilmer had tried to get out of his contract after his wife served him divorce papers just before production began. When that didn’t work, he apparently decided to make the experience miserable for everyone. He intentionally mumbled his lines. The movie became a case study in how not to make a film.
None of this is entirely surprising, of course. Kilmer didn’t want to make Top Gun either. He wore what he described as “gonky Australian shorts in nausea green” to his audition, read his lines indifferently, and somehow got the part anyway. Director Tony Scott chased him into an elevator to sell him on the role. Later, while making True Romance together, Kilmer started answering his phone as Elvis and called Scott in the middle of the night to sing him Elvis songs. This was apparently just how he operated.
There were moments of genuine commitment too. For Tombstone, Kilmer had the art department fill his bed with ice so he would shiver during Doc Holliday‘s death scene. He later wrote on Facebook: “When I died in Tombstone I laid on a bed of ice so I would shake and feel weird. It worked.”
After playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Kilmer said he needed therapy. He had gone so deep into Morrison’s world that he couldn’t get back out without professional help.
The trouble with all of this is that the talent and the behaviour were always inseparable. You couldn’t have one without the other, and for a long time the industry put up with the second because of the first. Marcus is arguing, essentially, that the calculus has changed. That if Kilmer were working today, the behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated. He might be right about that.
But we’re not sure he deserved the “worst human being” comment. That’s between Marcus and Kilmer.
