Val Kilmer & Tom Cruise’s Top Gun Feud Explained (Was It Real?)

The competition between Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in Top Gun was rumoured to also be the case off-screen with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, but is there any truth to these claims? Directed by Tony Scott, the 1986 action film focused on the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California dubbed TOPGUN and its qualified pilot learners. That included Maverick and Iceman who were rivals, both wanting to emerge at the top of their batch. 

Through Top Gun, the pair would commit to various kinds of debates — from actual activity to a trial of beach volleyball. Iceman and Maverick also liked shoving fun at each other to ascertain their authority. Despite the severe competition between the pair, their competition never became personal. In fact, by the time Maverick tragically lost his RIO, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) in a freak disaster, Iceman dialled down his cockiness in admiration of what happened. By the end of the film, they formulated newfound respect for each other, with Kazansky even evolving Mitchell’s wingman. It remains to be seen how Kilmer’s Iceman will factor into Top Gun: Maverick, and whether or not the event to be the best has continued.

Iceman and Maverick’s fictitious rivalry in Top Gun, however, was rumoured to pour into real life. Kilmer and Cruise have long been inferred to not get along. In his new Amazon documentary, Val, the actor eventually clarifies these persistent claims surrounding the real status of his relationship with his co-star. Fresh from acting school at Juilliard and virtually forced to do Top Gun, Kilmer reveals that he did try to bring some of his method acting while working on the Scott-directed flick. He says that he “would deliberately play up the competition between Tom’s character and mine off-screen as well.” This understandably made Cruise and  Edwards uneasy, to the point that they started protecting their distance from Kilmer and his crew once the cameras stopped rolling. 

Despite this, however, Kilmer conserves that he and Maverick actor Tom Cruise have always been friends and supportive of each other. He didn’t get into specifics about their friendship, but the fact that he scored a role in Top Gun: Maverick after reaching out to its celebrity and producer could be good evidence that there’s no bad blood between them. Kilmer once said that “Cruise couldn’t have been cooler” about the idea of getting Iceman back for the Joseph Kosinski-directed sequel. He then added that they “took up where we left off” and that “the reunion felt great.” It’s still ambiguous what Kazansky’s role in the Top Gun follow-up will be. Plot circumstances are strictly under wraps, with still no sighting of Iceman in any of the trailers thus far. 

With the rumours of Kilmer and Cruise’s real-life quarrel on the set of Top Gun now officially mashed, people can concentrate on their upcoming reunion on-screen as Iceman and Maverick in Top Gun: Maverick. There’s barely anything known about what transpired to the characters after the original 1986 film. But deeming that they became friends attending their graduation at TOPGUN, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they’ve also conserved their relationship more than three decades since they first met.