Will Forte and Val Kilmer. Photo:
Savion Washington/WireImage
- Will Forte wrote an essay for Vulture about his friendship with the late actor Val Kilmer, who died at 65 on Tuesday, April 1.
- Forte and Kilmer costarred in Forte’s 2010 comedy MacGruber, based on Forte’s popular SNL sketch of the same name, and remained friends after filming.
- Forte once let Kilmer stay at his home for two and a half months. The pair once considered joining the reality series The Amazing Race while living together.
Will Forte and Val Kilmer may have seemed an unlikely duo, but the comedian and movie star formed a friendship tight enough that they pondered taking on reality television together.
Forte, 54, wrote a first-person essay for Vulture on Friday, April 4 in which he detailed how he befriended Kilmer, who died at 65 on Tuesday, April 1, when Kilmer costarred in Forte’s 2010 movie MacGruber as its villain Dieter Von Cunth.
In Forte’s touching essay, the former Saturday Night Live star — MacGruber was based on his popular recurring sketch of the same name — described Kilmer as someone who “literally gave me the shirt off his back” while on set.
The pair stayed in touch in the years that followed, and Forte wrote that Kilmer asked to stay with Forte at one point while Kilmer “was having a dispute with his landlord” in Malibu, Calif. They lived together for two and a half months, Forte wrote. At one point, he described introducing Kilmer to reality television by way of watching CBS’ The Amazing Race, and that Kilmer “got really into it” after some initial hesitation.
“Then, at a certain point, he said, “Will, you and I have to go do The Amazing Race. We have to. Let’s do The Amazing Race,’ ” Forte wrote of Kilmer. “I’m like, ‘I am so fully in.’ We got really excited about it, and then we called our respective agents and managers, and they were like, ‘There’s no way you guys are doing that.’ That is, maybe to this day, the biggest regret of my whole career — that I never did The Amazing Race with Val.”
Val Kilmer and Will Forte in 2010’s MacGruber. Universal Pictures
By the time Kilmer had costarred in MacGruber, he was already world famous for movies like Top Gun, The Doors and Batman Forever, among dozens of other roles. His daughter Mercedes Kilmer told The New York Times on April 1 that he had died of pneumonia. 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick was his final movie.
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“I think we would’ve gotten out very quickly, but it just would’ve been the experience of a lifetime,” Forte wrote of his and Kilmer’s idea to compete on The Amazing Race.
Val Kilmer visits the United Nations headquarters on July 20, 2019 in New York City. EuropaNewswire/Gado/Getty
Forte also wrote in the Vulture piece that Kilmer was fond of Tina Fey’s NBC sitcom 30 Rock, which Forte had a role on, and that the pair once went for a jog while Kilmer wore a linen suit.
“I wish I had more time to remember the old stories. There are so many memories I’m leaving out. I’m sure we talked about collaborating on other stuff together, but nothing really serious,” Forte concluded his essay. “He was always like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go do this thing for Francis Ford Coppola’ or something like that. Somehow, we lucked into getting him to do MacGruber, but I didn’t know if I was going to get that lucky to get to work with him again. I settled for being his roommate.”
