Val Kilmer Was Too Beautiful to Be Recognized

One of the best film stars of his generation passed away this week at 65.

The way Hollywood, and by proxy, the audience, determines which actors are “serious” and which actors are merely handsome commodities is always a little arbitrary and bizarre. Daniel Day-Lewis is gorgeous, but everyone respects him as an actor who goes so deep into his characters that he disappears. Meanwhile, it took Leonardo DiCaprio five Oscar nominations to finally be recognized for his work as an actor, and it only came after he significantly uglied himself up and ate raw bison liver. There’s this weird line of demarcation where people have trouble accepting a handsome man as a serious actor unless the guy prostrates himself repeatedly through hardship, and that’s a superficial way to understand performance.

While most men would kill to be as handsome as Val Kilmer, for the actor, who passed away from pneumonia this week at the age of 65, it was a bizarre kind of impediment. Kilmer was as serious and as dedicated an actor as they come, and when he was accepted into Juilliard’s Drama Division, he was the youngest person to ever attend the acclaimed acting academy. When he came to stardom through his roles in Top Secret!, Real Genius, and Top Gun, no one doubted his talent, but he also seemed too pretty to be that good.

This led to a bizarre contradiction in Kilmer’s stardom. No one would say he was a bad actor, and yet the plaudits received by his peers seemed to elude him. Even when he famously threw himself into playing Jim Morrison for Oliver Stone’s music biopic The Doors, he didn’t receive any major acting nominations (this may also be because The Doors is a bad movie, but that’s not Kilmer’s fault). Kilmer should have won every Best Supporting Actor trophy available for his turn as Doc Holliday in Tombstone, but no accolades came his way for a performance that people still quote today (“I’m your Huckleberry…”).

Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone | Image via Disney