One of the most celebrated moments of the year’s biggest film,Top Gun: Maverick, would be the iconic reunion between originalTop Gunstars Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. The impactful scene was brought up in a chat between directorJoseph KosinskiandGlass Onionhelmer Rian Johnson (perVariety), and it was asked how exactly the scene came to be. In the film, Kilmer’s Iceman is depicted as having throat cancer, a way of working around the actor’s real-life health struggles.
As Kosinski explains, working that into the story was actually Kilmer’s idea. The director explains how once Kilmer pitched bringing Iceman into the sequel this way, the writing for making it happen came naturally from there. Though, leading up to film, there were changes made regarding how much Kilmer would actually speak.
“One of the most memorable days on set, for sure. It was Val who came up with the idea of Iceman being ill. I thought it was a very brave idea on Val’s part, but obviously then opened up this whole storyline for Iceman and Maverick that then we worked into the script. In the first versions, Iceman and Maverick had a conversation all the way through the scene — it was more spoken. As we got further into it, we changed it so that Iceman types out the first half of the scene.”
Kosinski goes on to explain how the change was in part for the sake of Kilmer, but that they also found that having him physically speak less at the start made it mean more when he does so.
“Yeah, part of it was that, the difficulty to speak. But also, it really charged the moment at the end of the scene where Iceman does speak. We had a version where we didn’t have the joke at the end and it was more a somber scene, but the joke made it in there.”
Related:Top Gun: Maverick Producer Open to Another Sequel, Says It’s Up to Tom Cruise
Getting Val Kilmer Involved Was Important
Everyone involved with the production wanted to get Val Kilmer to return forTop Gun: Maverick. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer previously spoke about howTom Cruise “really wanted” Kilmer to be thereto reunite with him. In fact, Cruise may have been more adamant than anyone that the reunion needed to happen. As the producer told People:
“He said, ‘We have to have Val, we have to have him back. We have to have him in the film. And he was the driving force. We all wanted him, but Tom was really adamant that if he’s going to make anotherTop Gun, Val had to be in it.”
Top Gun: Maverickwill land on Paramount+ for streaming on Aug 06, 2025, following a recent two-week return to theaters.
