As Rolling Stone noted in our 10 Essential Movies list, Val Kilmer was a “Juilliard graduate, a movie star, an actor who could play anything from fantasy heroes to flyboy villains, bank robbers to superheroes, dashing lead roles or demented sidekicks — Val Kilmer was all of these things, and way, way more.”
But before any of those roles, there was Chris Knight, Kilmer’s endlessly wisecracking character in 1985’s Real Genius. Playing the role as a combination of Will Hunting meets Bluto Blutarsky, Kilmer infuses Knight, who leads a bunch of Caltech-esque science savants in the quest to perfect a chemical laser, with equal parts charm, brains, sex appeal and life of the party.
For director Martha Coolidge, Kilmer’s death Tuesday at age 65 led her to reflect on the actor who landed the part almost instantly. “Val suddenly popped into my life when he submitted an inventive and funny self-made videotape audition,” Coolidge tells Rolling Stone. “So we asked him to fly in to L.A. to audition in person. When Val walked into the room, I knew ‘Chris Knight’ was there. He was charismatic, energetic, and funny.”
In a tribute on Instagram, Brian Grazer, the film’s producer who would go on to work with Kilmer on The Doors, Willow, and The Missing, recalled that Kilmer “waited for over three hours for me to leave the office, then he snuck into the elevator with me (I was on the 38th floor). The whole ride down, he flipped two quarters in his fingers like he does in the movie. I was completely captivated by that and by him.”
“Val was magnetic,” Grazer added. “He was fearless in his artistic choices, boundless in his talent … He commanded every role with undeniable charm and vulnerability.”
For Coolidge, Kilmer’s intellect was matched only by an innate understanding of Knight’s compassion for Mitch (Gabriel Jarret), the young, socially awkward genius he takes under his wing. “He also showed great empathy for the bullied younger physics student, Mitch,” the director says. “Val understood the complicated inner workings of Chris’s character, and knew how devastating it was to have been fooled by the University’s dark program to develop top secret laser weapons for the CIA.”
As we noted in our list, the cult film “may not get the accolades of The Breakfast Club or even Weird Science (both released the same year), but Real Genius holds up beautifully because of Kilmer’s smart-ass charisma … Kilmer’s wiseacre Knight gave real-life students struggling with fitting in an escape, and maybe even a template to follow.”
To the film’s obsessives, it’s also become one of the decade’s most quotable films, as Coolidge herself notes. “I trust he is somewhere idyllic now,” she says, quoting the film, “in Sun God robes on a pyramid with 1,000 naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at him.”
