Will Forte says he and Val Kilmer weren’t allowed to do ‘The Amazing Race’: ‘Biggest regret of my whole career’

Will Forte was especially close to Val Kilmer, who died April 1. The two costarred in MacGruber, the 2010 adaptation of his Saturday Night Live character of the same name, with Kilmer playing the villain. They stayed friends and, as Forte wrote in a new tribute, ended up living together for close to three months.

“I used to watch The Amazing Race,” Forte wrote in Vulture, “and he came back home at some point when I was watching it and was like, ‘What are you watching that garbage for? Come on, that stuff’s going to rot your mind.’ I said, ‘It’s pretty good. You should sit down and watch it. Give it a try before you s— on it.’ So he sat down and he started watching it, and he got really into it.”

Really into it. Kilmer wanted to be a part of the CBS series, which premiered in 2001, that sends contestants to international destinations hunting for clues.

“At a certain point, he said, ‘Will, you and I have to go do The Amazing Race. We have to. Let’s do The Amazing Race.’ I’m like, ‘I am so fully in,'” Forte recalled. “We got really excited about it, and then we called our respective agents and managers, and they were like, ‘There’s no way you guys are doing that.’ That is, maybe to this day, the biggest regret of my whole career — that I never did The Amazing Race with Val. I think we would’ve gotten out very quickly, but it just would’ve been the experience of a lifetime.”

Kilmer’s daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, told the New York Times that her father died of pneumonia. While he had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, she said he had recovered.

Forte explained that Kilmer’s extended stay with him came about when the star of The Doors, Top Gun, and Batman Forever was moving.

“He was in a situation where he was going to sell his place in New Mexico. He had been staying in Malibu, but he was having a dispute with his landlord, so he was looking for a new place and said, ‘Hey, can I stay at your place for a couple days while I’m looking for a new place?'” Forte wrote. “I don’t remember if he said ‘a couple days,’ but I got the impression that it was going to be a couple days. So he showed up on a Monday, and later that day, his assistant came over with two huge duffel bags filled with books, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this seems like it’s maybe going to be more than a couple days.’ It ended up being two-and-a-half months.”

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Forte said he had been a fan of Kilmer before they were friends, and he has a clear memory of realizing that his relationship with the guy who played Jim Morrison in the 1991 biopic about The Doors had changed. They were just sitting at the kitchen table with music in the background.

“These Doors songs started playing, and we spontaneously both started singing,” Forte wrote. “I think it started with ‘L.A. Woman,’ and then we sang ‘Roadhouse Blues’ and then ‘Touch Me.’ In that moment, I had kind of forgotten, Oh yeah, this is that same guy that I was such a huge fan of. Now he’s just become Val to me.”