With everything going on right now in the world, you could be forgiven for missing today’s perhaps most important news: Val Kilmer has a new memoir out, and it’s pretty damn bonkers. I’m Your Huckleberry is a decent, if incomplete, look back on the actor’s career, but it certainly isn’t lacking in massive amounts of weirdness. Case in point: This excerpt featured today over at The Daily Beast, which recounts Kilmer’s experience filming Top Gun alongside Tom Cruise and director Tony Scott.
Among the sample’s many, many things worth noting: Kilmer loves fisherman’s vests, quotes Ezra Pound, and initially wanted nothing to do with the film pretty much until Tony Scott imitated fighter jet noises for him. He also was the only dude on the cast to not puke after flying alongside navy pilots.
“We all went up in the jets several times and—here comes more vanity—I have to report that I was the only one who didn’t regurgitate, which, given the gut-wrenching drops and spins of those ferocious flights, was no mean feat,” Kilmer writes.
Kilmer later explains that he became so obsessed with his character of Tom “Iceman” Kazansky that he eventually quasi-hallucinated talking with the ghost of Iceman’s father “the way Macbeth saw the ghost of Banquo.”
Oh, and he also once straight-up stalked Stanley Kubrick in London. “Side note: I once flew to London when I couldn’t afford a ham sandwich to sit in a hotel room with a single videotape in hopes of hand-delivering it to Stanley Kubrick,” Kilmer recalls out of goddamned nowhere.
Read the excerpt, is what we’re trying to tell you. You owe it to yourself.
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