When Val Kilmer was a teenager, performing in high-school plays and making amateur movies with his younger brother, Marlon Brando was his hero. Like Brando, Kilmer eventually moved to New York to study acting, becoming one of the youngest students to be admitted to the Juilliard School’s drama program. And years later, after he acted alongside Brando in the infamously disastrous The Island of Dr. Moreau, Kilmer would nonetheless express a twisted kind of admiration for his co-star. “I wouldn’t call him normal,” he said of Brando on Late Show With David Letterman. “He’s a genius. Have you ever met any normal geniuses?”
Kilmer, who died last week at the age of 65, wasn’t “normal” either—which I mean as a high compliment. His commitment to the profession, the intensity of his working process, the curiosity and at times inscrutable logic guiding his choices of roles—all suggested that he knew no masters. Kilmer…