Val Kilmer dead at 65: Batman and Top Gun star passes away after long health battle | Daily Mail Online

CK: You mean you think you literally had the same experience as Doc Holliday?

Kilmer: Oh, sure. It's not like I believed that I actually shot somebody, but I absolutely know what it feels like to pull the trigger and take someone's life.

CK: So you're saying you understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

Kilmer: I understand it more. It's an actor's job. A guy who's lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. Most of these guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that's why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys that didn't get on the football team, guys who couldn't finagle a scholarship. They didn't have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. So—standing onstage—I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

CK: I don't question that you can more effectively represent that experience, but that's not the same thing. If you were talking to someone who's in prison for murder, and the guy said, "Man, it really fricks you up to kill another person," do you think you could reasonably say, "I completely know what you're talking about"?

Kilmer: Oh yeah. I'd know what he's talking about.

CK: You were in Top Gun. Does this mean you completely understand how it feels to be a fighter pilot?

Kilmer: I understand it more. I don't have a fighter pilot's pride. Pilots actually go way past actors' pride, which is pretty high. Way past rock 'n' roll pride, which is even higher. They're in their own class.

CK: Let's say someone made a movie about you—Val Kilmer—and they cast Jude Law2 in the lead role. By your logic, wouldn't this mean that Jude Law—if he did a successful job—would therefore understand what it means to be Val Kilmer more than you do?

Kilmer: No, because I'm an actor. Those other people that are in those other circumstances don't have the self-knowledge.

CK: Well, what if it was a movie about your young life? What if it was a movie about your teen years?

Kilmer: In that case, I guess I'd have to say yes. No matter what the circumstances are, it's all relative. I think Gandhi had a sense of mission about himself that was spiritual. He found himself in political circumstances, but he became a great man. Most of that story in the film Gandhi is about the politics; it's about the man leading his nation to freedom. But I know that Sir Ben Kingsley understood the story of Gandhi to be that personal journey of love. It would be impossible to portray Gandhi as he did—which was perfectly—without having the same experience he put into his body. You can't act that.

CK: Okay, so let's assume you had been given the lead role in The Passion of the Christ. Would you understand the feeling of being crucified as much as someone who had been literally crucified as the Messiah?

Kilmer: Well, I just played Moses [in a theatrical version of The Ten Commandments]. Of course.

CK: So you understand the experience of being Moses? You understand how it feels to be Moses? Maybe I'm just taking your words too literally.

Kilmer: No, I don't think so. That's what acting is.

We begin discussing what constitutes the definition of religion; Kilmer thinks an institution cannot be classified as a religion unless God is involved. When I argue that this is not necessarily the case, Val walks into the house and brings out the Oxford English Dictionary; I'm not sure how many working actors own their own copy of the OED, but this one does. The print in the OED is minuscule, so he begins scouring the pages like Sherlock Holmes. He pores over the tiny words with a magnifying glass that has an African boar's tusk as a handle. He finds the definition of religion, but the OED's answer is unsatisfactory. He decides to check what Webster's Second Unabridged Dictionary has to say, since he insists that Webster's Second was the last dictionary created without an agenda. We spend the next fifteen minutes looking up various words, including monastic.