‘MacGruber’ director remembers bizarre first meeting with Val Kilmer

Val Kilmer made a memorable first impression on filmmaker Jorma Taccone.

The MacGruber writer-director recalled his first meeting with the Top Secret star to discuss his role as the villainous Dieter Von Cunth in the 2010 action spoof.

“I drove out to Malibu to meet him, and his door was open,” Taccone said on a new episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. The comedian said that Kilmer wanted him to walk into the house without being greeted. “I go in the house, and he’s on the balcony…throwing these little chips or something into the ocean, and he’s going, ‘Are you a king? Are you a king?'”

Taccone was understandably confused by Kilmer’s behavior. “I was like, ‘What? What?'” the filmmaker recalled. “And he comes back into the room. He’s turned away from me. And he comes back into the room, and he starts tossing these little paper chips at me…and I’m like, ‘What are these?'”

The former Saturday Night Live writer eventually pieced the puzzle together. “And I started looking at them, and it takes me, like, a couple minutes to figure out that he was invited to Mardi Gras that year to play King Bacchus,” Taccone said. “The guy who, like, leads the float. And these are little paper chips that he’s supposed to be throwing out to the crowd with his face on it. And he was saying that he was a king.”

Cohost Seth Meyers asked, “Was he practicing?”

Taccone didn’t think so. “No, he was just messing with me, I think,” he responded, calling it a “wonderful” encounter. “‘This is how I’m meeting the director of this film that I’m gonna work on.’ From the jump, I was like, ‘Oh, God.'”

The director said that he immediately established a rapport with Kilmer, but second-guessed the appropriate tone he could take with the Real Genius star.

“I was texting Val after this lunch, and I was like, Can I say this? It seemed, logically, [that] what I should be responding to what he just said was [what] I was writing back: ‘My friends will kill your friends,'” he explained.

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“I don’t remember how we got to that part in the conversation of me texting him,” Taccone said. “I was like, Can I write this to Val Kilmer? It seems like that’s what I should be saying to this man right now. He was such this wonderful ball-buster of a human being, just f—ing with life and just, he was on every level the most interesting mind. I will forever remember that particular meeting.”

Listen to the full conversation about Kilmer above.