Since news broke last night that actor Val Kilmer had died at the age of 65, there has been an outpouring of tributes from fellow actors and filmmakers praising Kilmer’s talent on-screen. Matt Corman, co-creator/executive producer of USA’s Covert Affairs and Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again, has an insight into how Kilmer was off-screen.

When he was a very young writer in the 1990s, Corman worked for a couple of years as Kilmer’s personal assistant/researcher. He has shared with Deadline anecdotes from his time with the Top Gun star during the shooting of Heat and the infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau that reveal how funny Kilmer was in person.

“His wit and impersonations were astounding; it was a part of his persona that he didn’t really showcase as much as he should have,” Corman said.

Here are Corman’s stories that include a Charlie Chaplin-esque skit by Kilmer and a running gag in each of the actor’s voicemails.

I’ll leave it to others to unpack Val’s impressive and diverse body of work, and the awful illness that robbed him of his distinctive voice and came to define his later years. What I want to discuss is an often-overlooked aspect of Val— just how hilarious the man could be.

I came to know Val at the height of his fame. Batman Forever was “in the can” but had not yet been released. I was an extremely young writer, and Val hired me to help him organize some ideas he had for movies, and to type them into treatments. This was on the set of the iconic Michael Mann film Heat. I worked in Val’s trailer in downtown Los Angeles, with the sound of machine gun blanks echoing from the epic bank heist shootout being filmed just outside. I sifted through Val’s typed up pages and floppy disks (yup, this was a while ago) and I peered at scribbled notes on legal pads; I did my best to create a synthesis, a coherence. It was a daunting task, and, truth be told, the notes were all over the place. I sometimes felt like one of those forensic historians who try to recreate East German Stasi memos by cobbling together bits of shredded documents.

I did a decent enough job in organizing Val’s creative output that he invited me to co-write one of those scripts with him in Australia, while he was on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau. A lot has been written about that film, about the wild experiment of casting Marlon Brando and Val and Nelson De La Rosa. New Line conscripted the aging, legendary director John Frankenheimer to wrangle all of it in the dense jungle of Far North Queensland when the original director Richard Stanley was fired after just a few days of filming. Hundreds of drugged-out Australian hippies called “ferals” were hired as extras. They camped near the remote set and descended out of the hills like fog when craft services got breakfast going each day— it was quite a sight. Brando confided in me that he hadn’t read the script. He said this allowed him to make more spontaneous acting choices. Mind you, we were three months into production at that point. Beyond that, I have nothing to add here except to say that everything else you’ve heard about that production is true, and it was bonkers. But most of that experience was not too funny, and I’m here to tell you about how funny Val was.

So: One evening Val got really mad at me; he was yelling, in fact. I was crashing at his house in Cairns Australia, and I had gone out for a six-pack of VB beer without locking the front door. It was an oversight, as Val was paparazzi bait at the time, and it wasn’t inconceivable that someone could have tried to get in, take photos, steal stuff, whatever. I said I was sorry. Val started to cool down. As he went to grab his American Spirits, I realized with horror that earlier in the night while watching a Rugby League game on TV, I had sat on the pack of cigarettes on the couch and crushed them. But then, instead of getting madder, Val switched gears. He took out a severely bent cigarette and performed a ridiculous theatrical display. He started acting like a drunk trying to light his bent cigarette. His schtick was broad, but in the way Charlie Chaplin was broad, which is to say it was brilliant. I started laughing hysterically, and when Val saw that, he really committed to the bit, taking out his zippo and “failing” to light the bent cigarette despite several attempts. He crossed his eyes in mock drunken concentration. He burped, stumbled around, pretended to take a piss into a potted plant, leaning his head on the wall while moaning. He whispered in a weird Midwestern accent about wanting a “pork chop.” Val’s physicality and matinee idol looks only made the whole thing much funnier. Was Val performing this display because he felt bad about yelling at me, or because the bent cigarette was just too great a prop to pass up? I don’t know, but it was a comedic miracle in miniature, an entire production put on for my amusement alone, and although Val milked it, it was over much faster than I would have liked.

Val had a funny relationship to his funniness. I witnessed a couple of occasions when fans approached him and complimented him on his (hilarious) turns in Real Genius or Top Secret! Val would wince and say he only did those gigs for the dough, to use his term. Val idolized Brando and told anyone who’d listen that he only agreed to be in The Island of Dr. Moreau in order to act alongside his idol. Val considered Brando’s acting to be the aspirational pinnacle, the distillation of the “seriousness” he aspired to. But the Brando I got to see in Australia was hamming it up more than anyone. Brando acted with an ice-bucket on his head, imitated the Queen of England in his line readings and performed bongos at the wrap party while wearing a muumuu.

Val often took guff for the way he appeared on talk shows and other public appearances. He had this looping nonequatorial speaking style. He sometimes seemed spaced out or stoned or drunk. That’s basically the way he talked conversationally, too. Ideas trailed off or were finished slowly. It was a kind of cowboy’s cadence, and after a while you got used to it. He wasn’t on anything; he just came at ideas from odd angles. That’s what made Val’s comic genius even more impressive. Comedy is all timing, and when he needed to, when he wanted to, Val could turn that gear on, speaking more quickly with perfect punchy delivery. He was like a Formula 1 driver who refused to go above 30 MPH unless he was in a race.
Val could do amazing impressions of people both famous and not. He told me that he had an impression of me “ready to go” but it would be so accurate and cutting that it was best that he not reveal it. I didn’t press him on this point and my ego is the better for that.

After a year or so, it became clear that the script we were working on was going nowhere, and I stopped working with Val. I told him I wanted to pursue my own writing, and he was gracious about that.
Time can pull people apart. But whenever Val would leave me a voice mail, he’d begin in the same way, “Hey, it’s your old pal Val calling¬—” And then, after a perfect pause, as if there were any doubt, he’d add, “Val Kilmer, the actor.”

I’m going to miss you, old pal.