What happened to Val Kilmer? His final film was the one he'd waited 36 years to make

Val Kilmer played Tom "Iceman" Kazansky in 1986 and again in 2022, with nothing in between and a great deal in the way. The gap between those two performances is the story.

Kilmer died on 1 April 2025 in Los Angeles, at 65. The cause was pneumonia, with respiratory failure and squamous cell carcinoma listed among underlying causes. His daughter Mercedes confirmed the death. He had been living with the consequences of throat cancer for a decade by then.

The diagnosis he spent years not naming

Kilmer noticed a lump in his throat in 2014 and did nothing about it until he began vomiting blood. He was hospitalized in January 2015. A lifelong Christian Scientist, he described what he had publicly as "the suggestion of throat cancer" and initially denied having had a tumor at all. He went through chemotherapy and two tracheotomies anyway, at his children's insistence.

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The second procedure damaged his vocal cords. From then on he spoke through a valve in his trachea, covering the opening with a finger to force air through, and ate through a feeding tube. By 2020 he had been cancer-free for four years.

• I'm Your Huckleberry (2020) — his memoir, titled after the Doc Holliday line from Tombstone.
• Val (2021) — a documentary assembled from decades of home footage he shot himself, narrated by his son Jack in an approximation of his father's voice. It premiered at Cannes and won two Critics' Choice Documentary Awards.
• Top Gun: Maverick ( 2022) — his last film, released 27 May 2022, 36 years after the original.

Who got him into the sequel

Not the studio, at first. Kilmer wrote in his memoir that producers hadn't contacted him, and that he considered Iceman and Maverick inseparable — the two "went together like salt and pepper." The push came from the lead actor.

"He said, 'We have to have Val, we have to have him back. We have to have him in the film,'" producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Fox News in 2022. "Tom was really adamant that if he's going to make another 'Top Gun,' Val had to be in it."

How the scene works

The film writes his condition into the script rather than hiding it. Iceman, now a four-star admiral with throat cancer, communicates by typing on a computer screen, and speaks only a handful of words out loud — including the line that ends the scene, telling Maverick it's time to let go.

The voice audiences hear was reconstructed. The London company Sonantic built an AI model of Kilmer's speech from archival recordings of him at full strength, producing lines he could no longer physically produce himself. Spotify bought Sonantic in June 2022, weeks after Maverick opened.

Kilmer's son Jack, quoted by Fox News in 2022: "They honor the legacy of Iceman, and he was so stoked by it."

Top Gun: Maverick grossed over $1.4 billion. It was the biggest hit of Kilmer's career, and he is in it for roughly three minutes.

Earlier we wrote: ‘Hell no — I couldn’t keep up’: Brad Pitt on Tom Cruise ’s action stunts