Less than two months after Val Kilmer’s death, his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Tom Cruise has been effusive in praising the actor while talking to Sight and Sound magazine. The pair first played rival fighter pilots Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in the 1986 action movie Top Gun, before they returned for its 2022 sequel. In this second installment, Iceman has terminal throat cancer, which was a contributing factor to Kilmer’s death in real life. Cruise describes how the late actor still embodied his character despite being unable to speak, explaining, “He was Iceman.” (via Collider)
Kilmer returns as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick during a three-minute scene in which Maverick goes to his character for advice. “It was like time had not ed,” Cruise told Sight and Sound, in reference to working with his Top Gun rival again 35 years after the first movie’s release. “We were laughing and it was joyous.” When the cameras started rolling, however, the mood on set immediately shifted, as Kilmer switched into acting mode. “He became Iceman,” Cruise recounts. “The power that this guy has, even not saying anything, to become that character.”
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Reprising his role as Iceman in Top Gun: Maverick proved to be Val Kilmer’s final acting performance. He’d already had two tracheostomies in the years prior to shooting his cameo scene for the film, and could only speak with the aid of an electric voice box. Kilmer died at age 65, from pneumonia, on April 1, 2025, with his death certificate listing cancerous cells under his tongue as an underlying cause (via TMZ).
Tom Cruise has gone on to describe working with Kilmer one last time on the Top Gun sequel as “very special, to say the least, for me personally.” The Mission Impossible actor also said the following about Kilmer’s performance in the original Top Gun:
“I think he's in the movie maybe 10 minutes – that's the impact of an artist like that. What I love about what he did and how he played it [was] he just knew that tone to hit. He had to play it so you wanted these guys to be friends in the end.”
As it turned out, Cruise’s Maverick and Kilmer’s Iceman did go on to be friends, sharing a meaningful hug when they caught up one last time in Top Gun: Maverick. Likewise, Cruise has described his tearful onscreen reunion with Kilmer in 2022 as the culmination of a decades-long friendship between the actors.
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The Respect Of A Fellow Acting Great As Well As A Longtime Friend
Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer may have only appeared onscreen together during the two Top Gun movies, but their legacies will forever be intertwined thanks to these seminal, high-flying blockbusters. It was Top Gun that first launched the careers of both actors into the stratosphere, and it’s only fitting that Val Kilmer’s Top Gun: Maverick cameo has proven to be his final bow as an actor.
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It’s hard not to get emotional watching the two actors together onscreen in the 2022 movie, especially in the aftermath of Kilmer’s death. Cruise’s comments about the late actor’s power as an artist are particularly telling, given that his own performance in the Top Gun: Maverick scene featuring Kilmer is one of the most powerful pieces of acting we’ve seen from him over the past two decades. These two veteran action heroes managed to get the best out of each other in the toughest of circumstances.
