14 DAY TRIAL // In September this year, actor Val Kilmer was caught off guard by the paparazzi while running errands around town, and his photos went viral immediately because they revealed that he had been working hard on losing the excess weight that often made him the butt of all jokes online.
The other day, the paps caught hold of the actor as he was trying to make his way out of a clothes store where he’d been shopping – but this time, the comments aren’t praising his weight loss.
As you can see in the first photo in the gallery, Kilmer is now a mere shadow of himself, which has prompted commentary like “gaunt” and “worryingly thin” in reference to his current figure.
A celebrity weight story told ad nauseam
In the ‘80s, Val Kilmer was considered Tom Cruise’s biggest rival in terms of popularity and box office success, and he further cemented that reputation when he landed the much coveted role of Batman.
He had a reputation of being a pain in the neck on set and of acting out whenever he was told to do something he didn’t like, but that was yet to interfere with his image and his pull with the larger audiences.
All that came undone soon after, as he ballooned. Precisely because he’d been that famous and popular (and admittedly handsome), he was now mocked more bitterly than any other celebrity in a similar situation.
His tale of weight gain (some pundits even called him Fatman and headlines like “omg, what the hell happened to Val Kilmer?!,” preferably in all-CAPS, became common occurrence) was told and retold ad nauseam. For his part, he continued to do what he thought was best: he got sober and clean, got his life back on track and started working hard to get his career afloat as well.
Because make no mistake, this is Hollywood we’re talking about and in Hollywood even a pound matters, not to mention several dozens of them, which Kilmer was packing: his career took a nosedive.
In September, with the first batch of a now slimmer Kilmer, the story of and the mockery around his weight gain seemed to come to an end, as he finally started receiving some positive attention for losing weight.
Too fat before, too skinny now
That didn’t last long, though. Today, various celebrity blogs and tabloids are running headlines implying that Kilmer might have just gone from one extreme to the other, because his weight loss isn’t so much a bid to get healthy but to become downright invisible, if possible.
The actor appears even slimmer today than he did in September and many are convinced that if he’d revealed his face in the photos, people would still have trouble recognizing him. Yes, he is that thin now: if you check out the first pic in the gallery, you can see that the clothes hang very loosely on him.
Reports said that Kilmer lost the weight the old-fashioned, healthy way, by changing his diet to eliminate all that adds calories and little to no nutritional value, and by keeping active – by walking on the beach outside his house whenever he had some spare time.
Not few are those who think he should probably stop with the weight loss and focus on maintaining it instead. Do you agree?
