Nicholas Dye – Staff Writer

I’ve spent a good chunk of today trying to figure out how to best approach what I felt about Val Kilmer. Do I talk about his numerous roles? Do I give a detailed account of his life and how, at 17 years old, he was the youngest person at that time to be accepted to Juilliard? None of it seemed genuine, so I decided to give you a very small snippet from his life and mine but one that will last with me forever.

Early in June 2018, my wife at the time, and I had learned that Val Kilmer was going to be showcasing his one man play, ‘Citizen Twain’ at the Improv in Ontario, California. We quickly bought tickets and paid for the VIP seating and decided to make a date night out of it. The both of us have backgrounds in theater, but I am the real die hard when it came to being on stage so naturally, I was excited to see his performance. It was being shown in film format and was lovingly renamed ‘Cinema Twain’.

When we got to the Improv, we were seated right against stage left and couldn’t have been more than 10 feet away from him and listened with rapt attention as he explained how ‘Citizen Twain’ had come to be. For those of you who don’t know, feel free to look it up, but the long and short of it is, he wrote an entire one man play so he could better understand Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens before playing him in a film.

At this point in his life Val had to over annunciate everything due to his battles with cancer. He did so masterfully and managed to make everything funny and spoke so passionately about acting in this play in particular. The Improv was packed, a completely sold out show, and we all reveled in his performance. Afterwards, the Q&A began, and, once again, he spoke very passionately about the process he took in learning about Mark Twain. He fielded questions about his numerous films, actors he enjoyed working with, and also the ones he found difficult to work with.

At one point, I nudged my wife and pointed to his socks. Val was wearing these long socks that I can only describe as an explosion of color that looked like an acid trip. Not tie-dyed, but definitely funky. Wanting to see if I could make him laugh, I shot my hand into the air and waited for him to call me. When he finally did, I asked a two part question that began with some generic thing about his first feature film, ‘Top Secret’ and then I made a joke about the socks. He lifted his pant leg to see which pair he was wearing, and then looked at me with a genuinely disappointed and hurt look and made a comment about his battles with cancer and how he earned the right to be comfortable. He took about a two beat pause in which time the entire building fell silent, and I thought I was going to vomit. He burst out laughing and jumped up and came over and shook my hand and gave me a hug. We both laughed and then it became the running joke throughout the rest of the Q&A, which ran over the scheduled time. We took pictures with him afterwards and he double checked to make sure I hadn’t had a heart attack. We laughed a little and I ended up buying some of his artwork and one of his Funko pops. All in all, it was a night that I could’ve never predicted, but one that I will never ever forget.

There are so many things that can be said about Val Kilmer. For me, personally, he will always be one of the kindest and funniest celebrities I’ve ever had the chance to interact with. I’d like to think somewhere he laughed about that after the show on his way home. I will cherish his movies forever, and I will always be grateful for the time he took to tease a dumbass who teased him about his comfy socks. Rest well Mr. Kilmer and thanks for the heart attack.