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Val Kilmer’s kids, daughter Mercedes and son Jack, were his priority.
The actor — who died at 65 from pneumonia on April 1 — shared his children with his ex-wife, Joanne Whalley. Throughout his career, most famously starring as Tom Kazansky, a.k.a. Iceman in Top Gun, Val spoke about putting his family first, even if that meant passing on opportunities.
“I can’t be a responsible parent and only be there three or four months a year,” he told Vanity Fair in March 2012.
Val later opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about his two-year battle with throat cancer in a December 2017 interview with his children. While speaking to PEOPLE in August 2020, the Batman Forever star called his two kids “really brilliant.”
“I am just madly, wildly entertained by them,” he said. “My only gripe is that I never see them enough, so I never get enough of the wild entertainment that everyone else gets, but they’re really, really, entertaining.”
Although Val dealt with health challenges, Mercedes pointed out that “so many good things have come out of it.”
“We all spend so much time together,” she shared. “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.”
Here’s everything to know about Val Kilmer’s kids: daughter Mercedes and son Jack.
Mercedes Kilmer, 33
Val and ex-wife Whalley, who got married in 1988, welcomed their first child together, Mercedes Kilmer, on Oct. 29, 1991. According to the Los Angeles Times, the pair’s daughter was born in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Mercedes admitted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that she couldn’t “remember not being aware” of her parents’ fame. “It was about navigating how other people perceived us rather than any kind of reckoning,” she said.
Not long after her dad was diagnosed with cancer, Mercedes was hit by a car. “We were in the same hospital at the same time,” she told THR.
Mercedes has a close relationship with her father, whom she’s dubbed “a good friend” of hers. “My dad is such a smart and creative person that I love hanging out with, even if he wasn’t my dad, too,” she told PEOPLE in August 2020.
Not only is he a friend, but Val has also been her costar. Mercedes made her feature film debut in 2020’s Paydirt, in which she played her dad’s daughter on-screen.
“The producer called me up and asked me if I would play this role and I said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve found anybody yet to play my daughter, but I might have someone for you. Her name is Mercedes Kilmer and perhaps you’d be interested in meeting with her,’ ” Val recalled in an interview with PEOPLE. “Mercedes and the producer met, and they all had a ball.”
Working on the project with her dad proved to be a learning opportunity for Mercedes.
“It’s obvious my dad’s speech is compromised and so this whole experience revealed the personal effort I had put into working with actors with a disability, which I hadn’t done before,” she explained.
“It revealed how much I had to gain from working with people who have different abilities,” Mercedes continued. “My dad’s able to very artfully circumvent the limitations of his speech, so I learned so much watching him, how he communicated physically. It taught me so much about acting that expanded what I thought acting was, which was central to speech.”
Mercedes is credited as an associate producer on the Prime Video documentary Val, which is about her famous father. She and her brother attended a photo call for the documentary at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. Prior to the project’s release, Mercedes told Entertainment Tonight that the “entire movie” made her emotional.
“I wouldn’t say things surprised me about my dad. He’s such an open person that I know very well,” she explained. “But it did really surprise me to see it with an audience. I’m so used to people not understanding my dad. I’m so used to his public image being different than the playful, funny person that we know.”
When Val reunited with his former costar Tom Cruise for an emotional scene in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, Mercedes called their on-set encounter “extraordinary.”
“It means a lot to my dad as he’s very proud of that film. This is what he loves to do,” she told Page Six. “It was trippy and very special for my dad to be on set with all of his friends who made this movie when they were my age.”
Jack Kilmer, 29
Val and Whalley welcomed their second child, Jack Kilmer, in June 1995.
Jack mostly grew outside the spotlight and over the years, the actor shared glimpses of him. Kilmer proudly celebrated his son’s graduation in 2013 with a snapshot of himself and Jack. “My sons graduation today!” he captioned the post.
Jack has followed in his family’s footsteps. He appeared in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto, which also starred James Franco, and, according to Interview magazine, Jack “had done virtually no acting before walking onto set.”
At the time, Jack told the magazine that he and his father could “relate on a whole other level.” He said, “It was exciting to read a script with him.”
Jack’s credits also include the 2018 drama Pretenders, which was directed by Franco, as well as Josie and Summer 03. Like his older sister, Jack is credited as an associate producer on the 2021 documentary Val.
In addition to being an associate producer, Jack also narrated the film for his dad, whose voice has been left “impaired” as a result of “extensive radiation and chemotherapy treatment” for throat cancer.
“It was interesting doing the narration because our goal was to get me to sound as natural as possible,” Jack told the Los Angeles Times.
Meanwhile, Kilmer admitted that it was “shocking to hear how much” his son sounded like “the young version” of him. The Top Gun: Maverick actor confessed, “There were several times when I couldn’t tell who was talking.”
Jack told PEOPLE in 2021 that there are things they do every day to soothe his father’s “vocal cords and to repair them, but they’re very damaged.”
Val’s son said, “It’s funny I don’t notice it anymore. I’m so familiar with his voice that maybe I hear his old voice when I’m talking to him. But he doesn’t seem like he’s in pain when he speaks. Sometimes you can’t shut him up.”
Jack added, “It’s hard, but that’s life. We appreciate every day we get to see him and be around him.”
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