(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 20 January 2026 19:45, UK
Val Kilmer made a lot of different kinds of films, and while he’s best known as a man of action, thanks to the likes of Top Gun and Heat, he knew his way around a western, too, as his underrated performance in Tombstone can attest to, as well as fantasies, sci-fi adventures, and biopics.
He really could do it all, but one genre you don’t often associate with the late icon is comedy, for his resume isn’t exactly bursting with funny films.
His very first film was Top Secret!, a send-up of spy movies from the team behind Airplane!, and while he might have established a foothold in the genre with the release of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, he ended up not following through. He did make an uncredited cameo in The Love Guru, which…yeah, I got nothing to defend it with.
That doesn’t mean the former pin-up wasn’t a fan of comedy, as he revealed while speaking to author Cindy Pearlman as part of her book, You Gotta See This: More Than 100 of Hollywood’s Best Reveal and Discuss Their Favorite Films, the two classic movies he turned to whenever he was in need of a good giggle.
“I really like The Full Monty and Anchorman,” he said, “I like those movies, and those are my answers… In fact, I did a musical last year onstage. For the first few weeks during the down times I was running around backstage doing dumb Will Ferrell jokes because he plays this great pompous dumb guy in Anchorman. No one backstage knew what I was even talking about. I like this movie so much that I got a copy of the film and ran it so my 55 cast-mates could understand it.”
Released in 2004, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (to give the movie its full title) stars Ferrell as a hapless newsreader, set in the city of San Diego (which of course means ‘whale’s vagina’ in German), offering a farcical examination of an ultra-macho workplace, which is routinely cited as one of the greatest comedy movies of the 21st century. Its quotes are now commonplace in the English language, so if anyone ever tells you that something “escalated quickly”, then you’ve got Anchorman to thank.
The Full Monty, on the other hand, is a story about a group of out-of-work men who perform a striptease show to make money, and was seemingly less important to Kilmer at the time of this interview. They’re very different films, not least in terms of setting, with The Full Monty famously based in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield, which is many miles away, both literally and culturally, from sunny California.
The tones of the respective movies also vary wildly, with Anchorman being an out-and-out comedy, built solely to make people laugh, while the other film has more to it than that. It’s also a drama about one character’s quest to reunite with his son, while the narrative also deals with the personal problems of the rest of the gang, which is perhaps why it was nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars, an honour rarely reserved for movies that dare to be funny.
Feeling down and need a pick-me-up, you can give either of these two a go, for if they’re good enough for Val, then they’re good enough for anyone.
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