Val Kilmer wore Batman mask in one of final Instagram posts before death

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In one of his final posts to social media before he died this week at age 65, actor Val Kilmer donned his Batman mask in a selfie video shared with his 655,000 Instagram followers.

“I’m ready,” Kilmer said in the clip in which he appeared alongside artist and musician David Choe. “I have an angle for us. It’s been a while.” 

“You look great,” Choe said as Kilmer put on the mask and stared into the camera.

Kilmer, whose death was announced by his daughter, Mercedes, in a statement to the New York Times and Associated Press on Tuesday, played the brooding comic book hero in 1995’s Batman Forever after Michael Keaton declined to star in a third film.

Kilmer shared two children, Mercedes and son Jack, 29, with his ex-wife, British actress Joanne Whalley.

Mercedes said he was “surrounded by family and friends.” The cause of death was pneumonia.

In his 2020 autobiography, Val Kilmer: I’m Your Huckleberry, the actor offered up his assessment of the film, writing, “It’s so bad, it’s almost good.”

But he was excited to play the Caped Crusader opposite Jim Carrey’s villainous Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’ Two Face.

“I was buzzed about being Batman but hardly for artistic reasons,” Kilmer wrote in his memoir (per Den of Geek). “With two franchises going — Batman and The Saint — I could start an artists’ community, write poetry and plays, and become the wild auteur I saw as my destiny.”

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 1995, Kilmer said he agreed to topline the Joel Schumacher-directed movie without knowing what the story was.

“Everything was different about this job than I’d experienced before. The size of the character and how strange it was that Michael Keaton had decided not to do it — I just said yes, without reading the script,” Kilmer said.

In a 2020 interview with the New York Times, Kilmer said that he opted to only make one film in the series because he could see that audiences weren’t interested in who was playing the hero.

“That’s why it’s so easy to have five or six Batmans,” he said. “It’s not about Batman. There is no Batman.”

Once described by the legendary film critic Roger Ebert as “the most unsung leading man of his generation,” Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014.

After he recovered from the disease just a few years later, Kilmer underwent a tracheostomy which affected his ability to speak.

“I can’t speak without plugging this hole (in my throat),” he said in his 2021 autobiographical documentary, Val. “You have to make the choice to breathe or to eat.”

But that same year, Kilmer announced he was teaming up with audio technology company Sonantic to regain his voice with the help of artificial intelligence.

“I was struck by throat cancer. After getting treated, my voice as I knew it was taken away from me. People around me struggle to understand me when I’m talking. But despite all that I still feel I’m the exact same person,” Kilmer said in the video using his AI voice. “Still the same creative soul. A soul that dreams ideas and stories constantly, but now I can express myself again. I can bring these dreams to you, and show you this part of myself once more. A part that was never truly gone. Just hiding away.” 

Speaking to PEOPLE in 2020, Mercedes said that her father’s cancer battle brought them closer together.

“The health challenges have been just that, challenging, but so many good things have come out of it,” Mercedes said. “We all spend so much time together. Even just getting to meet all my dad’s friends from before I was born — there are so many beautiful things that happen when you need help from people.”

One of the biggest stars of the ’80s and ’90s thanks to roles as Jim Morrison in The Doors, a ruthless bank robber in Heat, and gunslinger Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Kilmer had faded from the spotlight in 2000s. But he reprised his role as Adm. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky from 1986’s Top Gun for a sequel opposite Tom Cruise in 2022.

In recent years, Kilmer sold his own artwork. He shared two recent pieces earlier this month on Instagram.

“Some art hums like a power chord — loud, untamed, and unforgettable. If this one strikes the right note for you,” he captioned one piece that appeared on March 10, while a March 22 caption read, “It’s got that late-night glow. Cool tones with a low burn, like when the camp fire cools down but you’re still wide awake.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, Kilmer was asked to sum up who he was.

“Well, I never had a business plan. I did, actually, I’m lying. My business plan was to get lucky, and I did, that was great,” he said. “And then my second business plan was to get lucky again, and there, I faltered.”

He admitted he didn’t play the Hollywood game as he should have.

“It’s a very social business,” he said.

Still, he had no regrets as to how his career played out.

“I don’t have any regrets, but there are two to three jobs, that if you do those action movies, you’re secured as a certain global stature,” he said. “It’s an adage, but it’s kind of true: Once you’re a star, you’re always a star; it’s just what level?”

mdaniell@postmedia.com