Kurt Russell Reveals Eerie Gift Val Kilmer Gave Him After Filming ‘Tombstone’ in Resurfaced Interview

Val Kilmer gave his Tombstone co-star Kurt Russell a symbolic gift after they finished filming the 1993 modern Western classic.

Speaking to GQ in January 2024, more than a year before Kilmer’s April 1 death at the age of 65, Russell revealed that after they wrapped filming on director George P. Cosmatos’s film, where they starred as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the late star bought him an acre of land.

“When you’re working with people, you’d get them, sometimes at the end of the show, you get them trade gifts,” Russell revealed. “It’s not mandatory, it’s not something that you gotta do or that they’ve gotta do.”

The actor said he bought Kilmer a burial plot in Boothill Graveyard in Tombstone, Arizona, where some of the most famous Old West figures are buried. Unbeknownst to him, though, Kilmer purchased an acre of land overlooking Boothill, which he gifted to Russell.

“I give Val this present and he looks at me and he turns to his driver and he says, ‘Give it to me.’ Because what I had gotten Val was a plot at Boothill, what Val had gotten me was an acre of land overlooking Boothill,” he recalled. “Doc Holliday was all about death, but Wyatt’s all about life. I guess that pretty much says it all…If you’re asking me if it was great working with Val Kilmer… the answer is absolutely.”

Tombstone released in theaters in December 1993. The film was loosely based on real events that took place in the 1880s in Southeast Arizona, including the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the Earp Vendetta Ride, and centered around several Western outlaws and lawmen, including Russell’s American lawman and folk hero Wyatt Earp and Kilmer’s dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc Holliday.

The film grossed $73.2 million worldwide, with Kilmer’s role as Holliday becoming one of his most beloved performances. Cosmatos told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 of Kilmer’s performance, per The Hollywood Reporter, “He works harder than most actors to make it look believable. He’s in the ranks of the great actors in America like [Al] Pacino or De Niro.”

Writing in his 2020 memoir I’m Your Huckleberry, named for his character’s line in Tombstone, Kilmer called his experience on the movie “profound.”

“The archetype of the gunslinger, played with a naturalism that only Brando could invoke, is ever present. I could never give up the chance to play such a character. That’s why when I had the chance to play Doc Holliday, I grabbed it,” he wrote. “I saw Doc’s situation as dire. I also saw his action as defiance in the face of death. I loved him.”

He added, per the New York Post, “My castmates were wonderful — Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp, and Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as his brothers — and the experience was profound. I cherish the experience of working with Kurt, whom I love like a brother.”

Kilmer passed away of pneumonia in Los Angeles on Tuesday at the age of 65, his daughter, actress Mercedes Kilmer, told The New York Times.