Director of Val Kilmer film calls actor the 'worst human being I've ever known'
Topics: Val Kilmer, Film and TV, Celebrity
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Mark Mainz/Getty Images
Topics: Val Kilmer, Film and TV, Celebrity
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 mixed reviews.
The movie saw Kilmer act as William 'Spooky' 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 sadly died of pneumonia at the age of 65 on April 1 2025 after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014.
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While Kilmer's passing came with a lot of praise by people in the industry who knew and worked with him, Marcus seemingly wasn’t one of them after their time together on the Conspiracy flick.
Now, he’s opening the hatchet to reveal his true feelings for the actor.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Marcus 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.”
He added: “And to any of you rolling your eyes because of the whole ‘don’t speak ill of the dead bulls,’ f*** that. [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 his posts before they reportedly disappeared from his profile.
However, he isn’t the first director to have a problem with Kilmer, as Joel Schumacher of 1995's Batman Forever called the lead star ‘childish and impossible’ and a ‘psychologically disturbed human being’ just one year after the flick’s release.
Meanwhile, John Frankenheimer worked with Kilmer on 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau, and said he’d never work with the star 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.”
While Kilmer recovered from his cancer diagnosis, 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 he reprised his Iceman character.
UNILAD has reached out to Adam Marcus for comment.