When a king falls for a queen. Val Kilmer admits in his new memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, that he had feelings for his Alexander costar Angelina Jolie before they even started filming the 2004 epic.
“When people ask me what Angelina is like, I always say she’s like other women and other superstars, but just more,” the actor, 60, writes. “More gorgeous. More wise. More tragic. More magic. More grounded. Is it worth it? Worth knowing people who require weeks of effort to understand even a little? Yes.”
Kilmer explains that he met the Tomb Raider star, now 44, on a New York street shortly before director Oliver Stone cast them as King Philip II and Queen Olympias, respectively, in Alexander.
“We developed a friendship,” he recalls. “I was around when Angie’s mom [Marcheline Bertrand] was losing her battle with cancer. They were living in her mom’s favorite hotel. Or maybe it was Angie’s. I happened to be staying there myself. It was meaningful and mortal and effortless and exquisite.”
The Batman Forever star admits he told Stone, now 73, that he would “only do [Alexander] if the king and queen could have flashbacks to falling hard for each other and storming the castle with passion, before turning against each other.” He writes that he “was only half kidding,” but the filmmaker “didn’t pick up on the humor.”
Nevertheless, Kilmer looked forward to rehearsing with Jolie, who had recently separated from her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton. (The ‘80s star, for his part, was previously married to Joanne Whalley.)
“I couldn’t wait to kiss Angie, buy her [a] Gulfstream jet and have V+J painted in rainbow glory on the tail,” he writes in the book. “She had recently adopted her first child, Maddox, and the paparazzi were obsessed with this postmodern Madonna, the perfect picture of unapproachable stardom and impossibly chic maternal instinct.”
However, the actress instead ended up falling in love with her Mr. & Mrs. Smith costar Brad Pitt. Their whirlwind romance was widely rumored to have caused Pitt’s divorce from Jennifer Aniston in 2005.
Jolie and Pitt, 56, dated for nearly a decade before tying the knot in 2014. The parents of Maddox, 18, Pax, 16, Zahara, 15, Shiloh, 13, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 11, separated in 2016 and became legally single in 2019.
I’m Your Huckleberry is available in bookstores now.
