INTERVIEW

Iceman returns: Val Kilmer on beating cancer, Top Gun and Batman

He was the Hollywood golden boy who had it all – fame, talent, charisma. But a reputation for picking fights on set and financial troubles torpedoed his career. Then he found a lump in his neck…

Val Kilmer, 61, photographed in his HelMel offices in Hollywood
Val Kilmer, 61, photographed in his HelMel offices in Hollywood
JEFF MINTON
The Times

It’s hard to believe now, as I write this, but just two months ago, when we were allowed to roam free, when we could board planes and alight from them and wander into hire cars and check in to hotels, I went to Los Angeles, where I was asked this question by Val Kilmer: “Do you think South by Southwest will be cancelled?”

But Val Kilmer no longer sounds like Val Kilmer, the movie star of the Eighties and Nineties who has mostly vanished from screens. He hasn’t since his tracheostomy. He can still squeeze air up through his windpipe, however, and past the hole that was cut into his throat and the tracheostomy tube, in a way that makes him somewhat understood – not