Director of Val Kilmer film calls actor the ‘worst human being I’ve ever known’
Director Adam Marcus has revealed his not-so-great feelings on late Top Gun actor, Val Kilmer, after his 2025 death.
Marcus, 58, worked with Kilmer as the director on the 2008 action thriller flick Conspiracy, which received rave reviews.
The movie saw Kilmer act as William MacPherson, a disabled Iraq War veteran who discovers a plot against undocumented immigrants in Arizona when his friend and friend’s family all go missing.
The Batman Forever alum died on April 1 from pneumonia at the age of 65 after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014.
While he recovered from the cancer, the tracheostomy caused damage to the actor’s vocal cords, leading him to step away from the film industry and focus on art instead.
His last movie credit was in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, where Kilmer reprised his Iceman character.
Val Kilmer worked with Adam Marcus on 2008’s Conspiracy (Hollywood Media Bridge)
While his death came with a lot of praise by people in the industry who knew and worked with him, Marcus wasn’t one of them after their Conspiracy flick.
Now, he’s opening the hatchet to reveal his true feelings for the actor.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Kilmer posted on Threads an image of the pair on the set of their film together.
But it wasn’t a happy time, per the director.
“#MicroIntellectMonday to that time when I directed that guy. The guy who played Iceman and Doc Holiday. You know the one,” Marcus wrote. “Here’s me and the Putz working it out on the set of Conspiracy. So yeah, that happened.”
Kilmer’s behavior on set has been criticised before (Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
He added: “And to any of you rolling your eyes because of the whole ‘don’t speak ill of the dead bulls,’ f*** that,” he said. “[If] this guy did one-tenth of what he did on my set today, he would have been cancelled in a blink.”
“Worst human being I’ve ever known… and that is really saying something,” Marcus concluded before they disappeared from his profile.
However, he isn’t the first director to have a problem with him, as Joel Schumacher of the Batman film called him ‘childish and impossible’ and a ‘psychologically disturbed human being’ just one year after the flick’s release.
John Frankenheimer worked with Kilmer on The Island of Dr. Moreau, and said he’d never work with Kilmer again.
To these allegations, Kilmer’s 2021 documentary about his life, titled Val, admitted to some poor behavior.
He said: “I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed. And I am blessed.”