To read more of GQ’s coverage of Val Kilmer through the years, click here.
In 1995, Val Kilmer hit a new career peak, starring in the biggest movie of the year (Batman Forever) and arguably the best movie of the year (Heat), both for the then-esteemed Warner Bros. studio. A decade later, his leading-man career was over. Actually, it was mostly over before that; he was the lead in the expensive flop Red Planet in 2000 (also for Warner!), and from there, he mostly starred in indies, or took supporting roles. In 2002, there was an inkling of what would later become an avalanche of direct-to-video titles, when he co-starred in something called Hard Cash, with Christian Slater. They would reunite in Mindhunters, a Renny Harlin movie shot in 2003 but released (albeit barely) in 2005.
But 2005’s other Val Kilmer movie, his final co-starring role in a Warner Bros. picture, bucked the downward-trajectory trend, at least in terms of quality. Despite the big-studio backing, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was not a major box office hit, in part because, at the time, its two stars—Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr.—were not the commercial draws they once were (Kilmer) or would become in a few years (Downey). 20 years later, Downey remains a superhero-sized celeb, and Kilmer is gone, passed this week following an earlier battle with throat cancer.
Stylistically and logistically, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang could have come out during Kilmer’s ’90s heyday, which was also the decade Black became the highest-paid screenwriter in history, and where Downey saw a lot of success (including an Oscar nomination) before crashing out from addiction. The movie itself, Black’s directorial debut, is a comic neo-noir with plenty of 1940s touchpoints; the characters obsess over a series of pulp detective novels, and the screenplay is based “in part,” per the credits, on the 1941 mystery novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them. Fans of Black’s The Nice Guys probably saw this movie years ago, but if they haven’t, they’ll recognize plenty: Hollywood-adjacent crimes, private investigators, wiseass banter, Christmas decorations.
Downey and Kilmer share the P.I. role; Downey is Harry, a thief who stumbles into acting and, to bone up for a possible detective role, gets paired with “Gay” Perry (Kilmer), an actual investigator who is, yes, gay. Black has said that he wrote Perry as gay because he’d never seen a gay character inhabit this particular kind of tough-gumshoe part, and any hint of self-congratulatory straight-guy trailblazing is eliminated by Kilmer’s no-nonsense performance, much of which involves getting frustrated at Harry’s mostly-nonsense dimness. “Who taught you math?” he spits out at one point, after Harry woefully miscalculates the chance of killing someone via Russian roulette. It’s not his only opportunity to call Harry stupid.
More famous, at least among Shane Black fans, is Kilmer’s delivery of an earlier exchange: “Look up ‘idiot’ in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?” “A picture of me?” Harry reasonably asks. “No!” Perry snarls. “The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!” But yes, Perry is also unapologetic and sardonic about his homosexuality, a trait that might have made any number of Kilmer’s peers twitchy about playing this character. He still looked like Val Kilmer in 2005, but thanks to his slight increase in middle-aged heftiness, the neatly-styled Perry still comes off as a potential bruiser.