Believe it or not, before Val Kilmer was the cold-blooded Iceman or the sweating, shotgun-toting Doc Holliday, he was a teen idol singing about "Skeet Surfing." Honestly, if you haven’t seen Top Secret!, you’re missing out on the weirdest, most chaotic debut in Hollywood history.
It was 1984. The directing trio known as ZAZ—Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker—were fresh off the massive success of Airplane! and looking for their next victim. They decided to smash together two genres that have absolutely no business being in the same zip code: 1950s Elvis Presley musicals and Cold War spy thrillers.
To pull that off, they needed a lead who could look like a million bucks while maintaining a totally deadpan face during a scene where a cow wears Wellington boots. Enter a 24-year-old Juilliard graduate named Val Kilmer.
The Audition That Changed Everything
Most actors show up to auditions in a nice shirt and a headshot. Not Val. He’d spent his youth hanging out at the Kentucky Fried Theater in LA, so he already "got" the ZAZ brand of humor.
When he went in for the role of Nick Rivers, he didn't just read lines. He showed up in a full-blown Elvis outfit with a James Dean pompadour. He committed to the bit before he even had the job. The directors had seen him in a play called Slab Boys with Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon, but it was that audition—the sheer audacity of it—that sealed the deal.
ZAZ later said they only auditioned a handful of actors because Kilmer was so obviously the guy. He could sing, he could dance, and most importantly, he could play the absurdity completely straight.
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Did Val Kilmer Really Sing in Top Secret?
People ask this all the time because his voice in the movie sounds suspiciously good. The answer is a resounding yes. Every single note you hear in Top Secret! is actually Val Kilmer.
He didn't just phone it in, either. Kilmer obsessed over the role, studying 1950s rock icons like Gene Vincent and watching Elvis movies on a loop. He spent weeks working with vocal coaches to widen his range. This wasn't a parody of singing; it was a legitimate musical performance that happened to be inside a parody movie.
You can hear that same obsessive preparation years later when he played Jim Morrison in The Doors. In fact, he supposedly sent Oliver Stone a tape where he mixed five recordings of himself and five of the real Jim Morrison, challenging the director to tell them apart. But it all started with Nick Rivers.
Why the Humor Still Hits Today
The movie is a relentless assault of gags. If you don't like a joke, just wait five seconds; another one is coming. There’s a scene in a Swedish bookshop that was filmed entirely in reverse. The actors had to learn their lines backward, and then the footage was flipped. The result is this eerie, gibberish-sounding dialogue that actually makes sense if you listen closely.
Then there’s the underwater bar fight.
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Most directors would use a green screen or some cheap trick. ZAZ made the actors actually hold their breath and fight at the bottom of a tank in 15-second intervals. It’s a lot of work for a joke about a guy breaking a bottle over someone's head underwater, but that’s why the movie has such a cult following. It’s high-effort stupidity.
The Famous Simchas Torah Line
There is a weirdly specific moment in the film that has become a legend in its own right. Nick Rivers is talking to the East Germans about their evil plan, and when he hears the date of the big event, he exclaims, "Sunday? But that's Simchas Torah!"
Kilmer isn't Jewish, but his pronunciation was so perfect that it caught the attention of Jewish audiences everywhere. The joke is that Nick Rivers—a blonde, blue-eyed American rock star—is somehow deeply concerned about a relatively obscure Jewish holiday. It’s a classic ZAZ "inside joke" that most of the audience probably blinked and missed in 1984.
Why Top Secret! Didn't Explode Like Airplane!
Honestly, the movie was a bit of a box office disappointment at the time. It cost about $9 million to make—nearly triple the budget of Airplane!—but it didn't capture the same lightning in a bottle.
Paramount actually pushed the release date back to avoid competing with Ghostbusters and Gremlins, which probably didn't help. Some critics at the time thought the "hybrid" genre was too confusing. Was it a musical? A war movie? A parody?
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It was all of them, and maybe that was too much for people in the mid-80s. But over the last few decades, it’s been rediscovered. You'll find it on almost every "best comedies you've never seen" list.
The Legacy of Nick Rivers
For Kilmer, this was the ultimate launchpad. It proved he wasn't just another pretty face. He had incredible comedic timing and a range that most leading men would kill for.
He went from this to playing the "Real Genius" Chris Knight, and then directly into Top Gun. If you look at those three roles back-to-back, you see an actor who was basically a chameleon from day one. He didn't have a "type." He just had talent.
How to Experience Top Secret! Properly
If you're going to watch it for the first time, or even the tenth, keep these things in mind to get the most out of it:
- Watch the background. Half the jokes aren't in the dialogue; they're happening behind the actors. Look for the giant telephone or the oscillating fan that moves the whole room.
- Listen to the soundtrack. "Straighten the Rug" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" are legitimately great tracks.
- Check the cameos. Look out for Omar Sharif (who gets crushed in a car) and Peter Cushing (who uses a massive magnifying glass).
- Don't worry about the plot. Seriously. Even the writers admitted the plot was just a clothesline to hang jokes on. The logic is nonexistent, and that's the point.
Top Secret! remains a testament to a specific era of filmmaking where you could spend millions of dollars just to see if you could make a cow look like it was wearing boots. It’s weird, it’s loud, and it’s the best thing Val Kilmer ever did before he started taking himself way too seriously.
If you want to dive deeper into 80s cult classics, your next move should be watching Real Genius. It’s the perfect companion piece to see Kilmer’s transition from goofy pop star to the "smartest guy in the room" archetype that defined his early career.