After the death of actor Val Kilmer, many of his fans have been sharing remembrances online about their personal relationship to Kilmer and his characters.
For writer Justin St. Germain, who grew up in Tombstone, that relationship began with Kilmer’s performance as Doc Holliday in the 1993 film “Tombstone.”
St. Germain joined The Show to talk about what made Kilmer so special.
Full conversation
JUSTIN ST. GERMAIN: It's this great thing about Val Kilmer, when he is a, a supporting actor, he often just kind of steals the whole movie. And so he has kind of all the best lines in that movie.
[“TOMBSTONE” CLIP]
He's just so like charming and memorable. Ever since the first moment I saw it, you know, I, I had even by then, even by 12 years old, I had heard plenty about Doc Holliday, and I have never been able to think of Doc Holliday without thinking of Val Kilmer ever since, and I feel like that's a real measure of, of a performance, you know.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Do you think there was anything about the, the real life character of Doc Holliday that you had heard at that age and something in Kilmer's performance that aligned for you?
ST. GERMAIN: I think most of what I remember about about the stories at least that they tell about Doc Holliday, which, you know, obviously, I don't know how close they are to the historical, factual person, but it was, he was kind of this embodiment of of like friendship and loyalty, you know, he was just [Wyatt Earp’s] best friend who followed him, you know, into the gunfight, and and kind of all over the place, and and I think he really did embody that in the movie.
He's just this like fiercely loyal, he's fiercely loyal to Wyatt, and that's kind of like, he's a very principled person, but that's kind of his main characteristic is that he's just willing to kind of do anything for his friend.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine if you were 12, 13 watching a movie like that. Not to, you know, put my own experience into this, but the idea of having somebody in your life at that time who was like, I got you, man, no matter what. That, that would have been a big deal.
ST. GERMAIN: Absolutely, yeah.
DINGMAN: There are some actors like that, right? Would you agree? That yes, they have performances that are critically acclaimed. Yes, maybe they were super bankable at the box office and, and that is noteworthy for whatever reason. But some of these people on some cellular level, we just felt like they understood us.
ST. GERMAIN: Oh yeah, for sure, Val Kilmer was really the one that I wound up following and thinking about. I saw a lot of his other movies. When his memoir came out, I read his memoir.
I, a friend, actually a former partner bought me as a birthday gift, his book of poems, that he self-published in the, I think in the ‘80s, late ’80s, early ‘90s. And yeah, so I just kind of developed this pretty strong personal connection. In my, in my office at work, I have one of his art prints.
DINGMAN: With some of these actors, I think, and maybe Kilmer is one, part of what you're reacting to is that even though they play a lot of different characters, and Kilmer absolutely did over the course of his career, everybody from Doc Holliday to Batman, there is something kind of essential about them that doesn't change. And maybe it's, it's there sometimes even when they don't want it to be there, like they can't help but be themselves.
ST. GERMAIN: There's something about Val Kilmer where I think a lot of his best roles are, are these kind of haunted or doomed figures.
DINGMAN: That's something that I, I remember really resonating with from his performance in “Heat.” You know, it's this big, you know, bravura performance from Pacino and Robert De Niro in his way chewing the scenery. And Kilmer is just kind of there like really occupying this totally bonkers heist situation. And I, I wouldn't have been able to use that word until you said it, but there is something kind of haunting, or haunted about his presence there, like he It's like he's resigned to this mayhem.
ST. GERMAIN: Yeah, yeah, I think that's true, and just that, that sense of stillness and the sense of like physicality. He just has such a presence on the screen and and you're right, ‘cause when you see him, I think about “Tombstone” always as my first reference point, but in a lot of those moments, there's these moments where they're about to walk down to the O.K. Corral, and even though he is at the time in the movie, very ill from tuberculosis, you know, he's sweaty, he's, he's just crawled out of bed to try to go help his friend. He's the calm one.
DINGMAN: It seems like with Kilmer, I mean, he's so handsome. But obviously, there's a lot of inner life there. I mean, you don't self-publish a book of poems, you don't make, write all these books, you don't make art prints unless there's really something going on internally.
And I wonder if that's what accounts for the phenomenon you're describing of him being particularly memorable in these supporting roles, where it's like they're not asking him to carry the movie, they're not asking him to be the guy on the poster necessarily.
ST. GERMAIN: Yeah, I think that's true. And, and you, I think the supporting role lets him bring maybe not quite the Nic Cage level of chaos, but this little bit of chaos, he seems to kind of embrace this, this kind of, you know, like the that character like you were saying that character in heat. It's just kind of an agent of chaos.
DINGMAN: Right.
ST. GERMAIN: So is Doc Holliday.
DINGMAN: There's a, “Heat” is such a violent movie. And Kilmer, I feel like it falls to his character to really engage with the horror of how violent it is. I mean, there's this very memorable scene where he's, I forget exactly what the circumstances are, but he's like reloading this gun, and you just, there's just this look on his face like, I have to get the shells into this weapon as quickly as possible so that I can kill more people. It's like the, this terrifying singularity of focus.
ST. GERMAIN: My brother is in law enforcement, and he told me that actually sometimes they show that clip as training, like in training for, you know, that sort of situation.
DINGMAN: Really?
ST. GERMAIN: Because really it seems like Doc, or Val Kilmer must have, sorry, I'm slipping into the Doc Holliday, Val Kilmer must have had some sort of training or took it so seriously that like he actually understood like what the military training would be for like how he's reloading, how he's kind of like using cover his fields of fire and stuff like that.
DINGMAN: Wow. Well, maybe in closing, Justin, if somebody has been seeing all these headlines about Val Kilmer and and wants to get an appreciation of him in a movie that people don't talk about as much, what would you recommend?
ST. GERMAIN: I mean, really, the other one I would, I would recommend, which I just loved, was his documentary. He had a documentary called “Val,” I think it was four or five years ago, and it's really thoughtful, and it's really smart.
He's lost his voice by then because of his throat cancer and so, well, mostly lost his voice, and so there's a moment I remember he's at some sort of function where he's kind of doing like a meet and greet, and it's a it's an Old West kind of thing, like he's, everybody wants to talk about Doc Holliday.
And then the camera kind of captures him afterwards, we're sort of walking backstage and he just has this moment where he is thinking like, he says something to the effect of like, “I don't know, what does it mean that I'm, I'm here trying to recapture glory from 25 years ago, you know, I'm talking about who I was 25 years ago,” and he just had this really like human vulnerability, that that's kind of the thing I think about recently in the days since he passed.
