Margery Simkin’s – Forty years after Top Gun became a defining 1980s blockbuster, casting director Margery Simkin looks back at the costly, hard-fought decisions behind its cockpit-ready ensemble—Tom Cruise as Maverick, Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer as the central foils, and th
When Margery Simkin talks about Top Gun now, it isn’t with the glow of hindsight. It’s with the bruising clarity of someone who had to fight for the right faces—often against people who didn’t fully believe the casting logic until it was already set in motion.
Simkin, who most recently cast last year’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, says Top Gun arrived early in her career.. She had already built working relationships with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer through Beverly Hills Cop. and she had a rapport with director Tony Scott after working with him on a project that never got made.. By the time she joined Top Gun. the script—after several major rewrites—was largely complete. and she was tasked with assembling a flight crew.
The stakes were simple in shape, brutal in reality: the film needed actors who could embody the roles in a way the audience would feel immediately. The battles, Simkin says, could drag on.
Simkin describes a long push-and-pull over who would portray Goose, Iceman, and Viper—and she frames it as a constant struggle to find the “perfect actors” to jump into the cockpit. Even before she picked up the phone, the studio calculus was already colliding with her instincts.
In the middle of all that, Top Gun’s leading man became the first flashpoint.. In 1985, Tom Cruise was coming off Risky Business, after supporting roles in Taps and The Outsiders.. Simkin says he hadn’t yet proven the star power to open a film. but his confidence—delivered through his agent. Paula Wagner—arrived at the exact moment the production needed momentum.
Simkin recalls Don Simpson calling her with the blunt problem: “Paula Wagner wants a million dollars for Tom. Who else is there?” For Simkin, the question quickly became whether anyone else could seriously compete for the role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. She says that in her view, there wasn’t.
She tried to find a cheaper alternative. paging through her notebooks of young men she’d seen in auditions over the last few years.. Cruise had also previously read for her, and she says she understood what he could bring—toughness without losing charm.. She had seen him in a tougher version of himself in Taps, and she had met him.. “Tough but charming” is how she describes the blend that felt right for Maverick.
When she reached back out to Simpson, she didn’t soften the message. “Pay him,” she said.
Goose’s casting came with its own kind of pressure: the character wasn’t meant to outshine Maverick. But Simkin says Goose still had to hit hard, because the screenplay’s emotional engine depended on the audience caring when he was gone.
The first disagreement was about comedy.. Don Simpson initially wanted a funny sidekick, someone like Paul Reiser, whom Simkin had previously auditioned for Beverly Hills Cop.. Simkin remembers Simpson saying. “I want somebody funny.” Her response was grounded in the role’s job in the story: the point wasn’t just to be entertaining—it was to ensure the audience would mourn him.
That’s why Anthony Edwards became central to the fight.. Edwards had taken on small roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Revenge of the Nerds. but Simkin says Top Gun was where she believed he finally had to break through.. She describes him as “so sympathetic. ” with a kindness on his face. and she says she thought audiences would both love him and be crushed when he dies.
Simkin even ties her proudest casting work to the core clashes of the production: “The two biggest fights on Top Gun casting-wise were Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer.” She adds, “I’m proud of that because when you look at it, that’s where they jumped off for the new movie.”
Val Kilmer’s path to Iceman was the opposite of straightforward. Simkin says that from the time she signed on, she wanted Kilmer as the stoic Tom “Iceman” Kazanzky, and she knew him from his Juilliard days. She had also seen him in a play about the Baeder Meinhoff gang at New York’s Public Theatre.
But studio assumptions didn’t match Simkin’s instincts.. She says she was barely even aware of Kilmer’s only two prior film roles: comedic turns in Top Secret and Real Genius.. When she tried to secure him, she says the studio pushed back hard.. The studio told her, in effect, “It can’t be him.. He’s a comic actor.. He’s not a dramatic actor, and you can’t cast him.”
Simkin says she was confused—until Tony Scott stepped in and helped her fight for the role after Kilmer met with Scott.. Still, the convincing wasn’t easy.. Simkin recalls executives being “completely bewildered” because they had only seen Kilmer in two comedies.. Her repeated point was the same: Kilmer had been in The Baeder Meinhoff Gang.
Casting, she suggests, often hinges on strange, unlikely circumstances. She learned she was seeing the bigger picture from a play, even as the studio was stuck on what had made it to the screen.
Even the love interests weren’t immune to the pressure and chaos of a changing script.
Simkin didn’t play as direct a role in casting Tom Cruise’s love interest Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood. She says Kelly McGillis had garnered attention for her work in Witness, and director Tony Scott signed off on her because, she says, she was a studio choice.
But Simkin still remembers attempts to steer the casting in a different direction—one actress she leaves unnamed.. She believed that choice was far too young and inexperienced for Charlie.. Those arguments were tied to a major script change.. Initially, Maverick’s love interest had been written to be a gymnast or aerobics instructor.. The character later shifted into a world inspired by the real-life civilian instructor Christine Fox, with Charlie integrated into Miramar.
Simkin remembers the push from an unnamed side: “Somebody kept pushing this actress who was much younger. saying. ‘She’s perfect.’” She says she responded bluntly: “She’s totally wrong and she’s too young.” The pressure stretched across days and weeks. until the conversation landed somewhere unexpected—when the person said. “Why can’t she be a gymnast?”
In Simkin’s telling, there was another culprit behind the confusion: draft mix-ups.. She describes a system where script drafts ended up in agency libraries. and sometimes the wrong draft or changed scenes were pulled.. Actors could show up with the wrong material.. She points out how different that world is now.
Yet the production’s insistence on getting the emotional pieces right didn’t stop with Charlie.
Simkin says she ultimately cast Meg Ryan for the role of Goose’s wife. Carole Bradshaw—a small role that carries outsized weight because it helps build the emotional impetus for Maverick’s character arc.. Ryan had largely worked in television. appearing on the soap opera As the World Turns. and Simkin admits she wasn’t impressed after seeing a TV movie or something similar.. But she also says she trusted Ryan’s agent. who kept pushing Simkin to meet her and insist she had changed and grown.
Ryan came in for the Kelly McGillis part, Simkin says, and then the role evolved around the moment.. At that time, Simkin explains, Ryan’s character didn’t exist in the script.. Carole was added later to emphasize Goose’s loss.. Simkin describes her first reading for the part as “a little kooky and charming and adorable and not at all right for that part. ” but she still delivered something the production could build on.. When the writers added the role, Simkin says, “I thought of her immediately.”
She also considered Holly Hunter for Carole, but Hunter was acting in a play in New York at the time and couldn’t come to Los Angeles for an in-person audition. Simkin videotaped Hunter—but she says it was production’s ability to meet Ryan that sealed the casting decision.
Even the instructors and pilots had their own casting logic.
Top Gun features a packed ensemble of pilots and instructors at the Naval Academy. and Simkin points to Mike “Viper” Metcalf as key—commanding officer. Vietnam vet. and someone who served with Maverick’s father.. Metcalf. in Simkin’s view. is strict enough to chip away at Maverick’s arrogance. but fair enough to recognize Maverick’s potential.
For the role, Simkin says Tom Skerritt was an obvious choice.. She praises him as a “fantastic actor” and defends his style against the studio’s concern that he was too low key to be loud enough.. Simkin’s reply was about command without noise: “He commands silently.. You don’t have to bark to be in charge.”
Skerritt also offered tonal contrast, she says, against actors like Michael Ironside, who held a more traditional military drill sergeant ethos. “Those other parts were more shout-y,” she notes, and she wanted “different colors.”
One casting surprise came from outside the usual cockpit geometry.. Tim Robbins landed a small part as another pilot-in-training, Sam “Merlin” Wells.. Simkin says she agreed to see him because Robbins’ agent was “extremely pushy” and kept calling her every day.. She adds that he was “really good,” even if she wouldn’t have normally seen him.
Then the practical problem arrived: Robbins is 6-foot-5, while fighter pilots tend to be shorter to fit into their planes.. Simkin remembers making the kind of call casting rarely leaves time for: “How big can someone be to get into the cockpit?” It’s a detail that shows how many battles were never only about talent.
What stays with Simkin, after all those fights with studio brass and the repeated stress of casting leading roles, isn’t the argument. She says she has fond memories of the work itself.
“It was very memorable,” she concludes. “But you don’t think about any of that [success] when you’re doing it. You’re just doing your best on that job and then luck happens or it doesn’t.”
Top Gun Margery Simkin Tom Cruise Anthony Edwards Val Kilmer Kelly McGillis Meg Ryan Tim Robbins Tom Skerritt casting director Tony Scott Maverick Iceman Goose