I thought Val Kilmer was a superhero from the first time I laid eyes on him. He was my first big-screen Batman, stirring some note of excitement in my soul that had remained untroubled by Adam West’s shark-repellent-bat-spray-wielding TV version. I was nine years old when Batman Forever arrived in cinemas, which was probably exactly the right age to be awed by its schlocky, larger-than-life charms. There was Tommy Lee Jones, seething as the terrifying Two-Face, Jim Carrey stealing scenes as the demented Riddler, and, at the heart of it all, there was Val himself, a superhero who looked like a matinee idol. At least he did when you could see his face. As Kilmer once remarked to the Orlando Sentinel: “Really, in that Batsuit, it wasn’t so much about acting except with your nostrils.”

At the time, it would never even have occurred to me that Kilmer – who died yesterday at the age of 65 – wasn’t having the time of his life strutting around in black rubber and flaring his nostrils at Nicole Kidman. In Leo Scott and Ting Po’s 2021 documentary Val, which was born out of thousands of hours of home video, Kilmer revealed that starring in Joel Schumacher’s comic book romp left him feeling like little more than a tiny cog in a giant machine. He had always seen himself making high art – he went to Juilliard after all – and years earlier had turned up his nose at Top Gun’s “silly script”, before being contractually obliged to play Iceman. He had no such obligation with Batman, though, so he turned down reprising the role for Batman & Robin, passing the poisoned cape to George Clooney, and made The Saint instead.

If, by some unlikely turn of events, I had been a child career adviser to Kilmer at this point, I’d have told him to make exactly that move. The Saint was even cooler than Batman. Based on a literary series by Leslie Charteris, The Saint had already been turned into a TV show in the Sixties starring Roger Moore, so naturally it was expected to provide Kilmer with his James Bond role. Here was a different type of superhero for him to embody: suave, sophisticated and with the top half of his face entirely unobscured.

Things did not work out as planned. Kilmer’s Simon Templar is apparently a master of disguise, but the outlandish costumes and not-great accents just don’t really work in the context of a film trying to play things straight. (It didn’t help that Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out in the same year, 1997, spoofing the sorts of films The Saint was indebted to and making it appear even more old-hat by comparison.) What had once been talked about as Kilmer’s chance for his own globe-trotting franchise turned out to be his final appearance as a leading man.

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