Miles Teller Is Ready for Takeoff
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MILES TELLER IS TRYING to connect. We’re in Pandemic World, and the star of the oft-delayed-no-I-swear-it-is-coming-out-someday Top Gun: Maverick is talking via Zoom with some starstruck Navy sailors in Guam, Bahrain, and Japan. It is March 2020, and there’s still hope that the movie will be released in the summer. (Remember hope?) Teller can’t travel, so he’s doing the video meet and greets instead.
It’s part promotion, part virtual USO show. The men and women, mostly in their 20s, are a bit tongue-tied, and Teller is trying to loosen them up by asking about their boyfriends and girlfriends. He makes them grin and relax a bit. Top Gun: Maverick’s flight scenes were shot on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. A shy female service member works up the courage to ask Teller about what he saw on the flight deck. “I hear they’re the best sunsets ever.”
Not that most sailors would know, but for all the perceived dash and dare of naval aviation, the hard reality is that of the 5,000 or so crew on a carrier, maybe 400 or 500 see the sun and sky on a regular basis; the rest work belowdecks in a labyrinth of tunnels, reactors, and recirculated air. The 33-year-old Teller has the droopy eyes and smile of an almost-super-famous movie star, his face faintly scarred from a car accident that nearly killed him when he was in college. (There are still rocks in his skin.) He edges up in his seat slightly.
“There was an amazing one, an awesome sunset, and you’re cruising on the water on this incredible ship.” He pauses for a second and gets a little deep. “Sunsets and the stars—those have been things since the beginning of time. It reminds you there are so many people out there looking at the stars. It’s a universal connection.”
A few heads on the screen nod. The moderator moves on to another service-woman, this one in Japan; she mentions that Hiroshima is her favorite city, followed by Tokyo. Teller cuts her off with excitement. His head moves closer to his camera.
“I was in Tokyo,” he says, “and that was the first time I used one of those Toto toilets.” Everyone looks confused. “You know what one of those is, dude? It’s a heated toilet! And it sprays you and then air-dries you. They know what they’re doing over there!”
Another servicewoman mentions she has a Toto toilet. Teller fully engages.
“Dude, my wife got it for me for Christmas, which was really nice of her. I put it in the downstairs bathroom so everybody could use it. And they spend so much time in there, it is ridiculous.”
Now everyone is nodding. The movie star enjoys a good toilet! Common ground has been found. Miles Teller has connected.
THE GREAT THING about the toilet story is it goes against type. Miles Teller is not seen as a funnyman but rather as serious as a tax audit. For a decade, he has been on the precipice of what can be called grim megastardom. He first got noticed in Rabbit Hole (2010), as the scared teen who runs over Nicole Kidman’s four-year-old son with his car. Then there was The Spectacular Now (2013), in which he plays, as he told the Navy crowd, “a teenage alcoholic, good times.” Sure, he has mixed in forgettable popcorn fare like remakes of Footloose (2011) and Fantastic Four (2015), but Teller–to paraphrase Leonard Cohen–wants it darker. “I’m attracted to roles that are close to real life,” he says.
There’s an intensity to his performances that makes you wonder whether Teller is going to tell you a joke or pop you in the mouth. For me, it’s best encapsulated in Thank You for Your Service, a 2017 war drama in which he stars as a chewed-up-and-spat-out soldier recovering from a harrowing Iraq tour. There’s a moment when Teller’s character, who has recently returned home, brushes his teeth with a ferocity that leaves you fearful he is going to snap the toothbrush in his mouth. Teller got the inspiration from a military pal. “I have a friend who returned from over there, and I remember him one day tying his tie with this intense thousand-yard stare,” he says when I ask him about the scene.
Teller has been content to make his harsh-realm movies and avoid the kind of iconic life-shifting role where you suddenly see a version of yourself turned into an action figure at Toys“R”Us. Some of the superstar avoidance has been intentional, and some of it has been self-inflicted.
In the past, his brushes with the spotlight have not always gone smoothly. There was a 2015 Esquire cover story for which he went for drinks with a writer who openly contemplates in the first sentence whether Teller is, well, a dick. “It was frustrating because my parents always told me the one thing you take to the grave is your reputation,” says the actor, who insists his attempts at humor were badly misinterpreted. There was also a 2017 arrest for public intoxication. (He was released after four hours.) He says that drama is all behind him.
Teller got married in 2019 to his longtime girlfriend, Keleigh Sperry, a model and the aforementioned toilet buyer. He proposed in 2017 on a safari in South Africa, leaving a rose and a note in a tree out on the savanna. “She thought at first it was a marker where someone got killed or something,” says Teller. “Then she read the note.”
It had the day they started dating and that day’s date on it. “I said, ‘That was the first day I asked you to be my girlfriend, and today is the last day.’ ” Afterward he dropped to his knees and popped the question. “I found my person,” says Teller. “I feel really lucky.”
Then his luck ran out along with the rest of the world’s. 2020 was going to be his breakthrough year. Top Gun: Maverick was destined to be a summer blockbuster, with inverted pilots, wild dogfights, high-stakes shirtless sports on the beach, and jets launched into golden skies. There wouldn’t be a need for Teller’s subtext; Top Gun is all surface and interviews about what Tom Cruise is really like and $20 tickets to see it in IMAX.
But that was in the Before World. As with everybody else, Teller’s next big step has been postponed due to COVID-19. Maybe you were going to take a new job. Maybe you were going to move to a new city. Maybe there was that girl you’d finally worked up the courage to ask out. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re Miles Teller and you were about to star in a film that might do a billion in global box office. Now he waits and tries to make sense of it all. He is like a Top Gun pilot looking to land his plane after a long mission. But the guy with the sticks on the flight deck is waving him off. He refuels and keeps circling. He is on pause, just like the rest of us.
TELLER TAKES pains to let me know he wasn’t a tortured young man and comes from a good family, by way of south Jersey and central Florida, where he sang and mugged with his two sisters and the three of them dressed up as their favorite Saturday Night Live characters for Halloween. Still, the path has not exactly been gilded. After his junior year of high school, he spent six weeks in an intensive acting course in New York, taught by someone who could, in some ways, be compared to the sadistic music teacher (J. K. Simmons, an Oscar winner for the role) who tortures his character in the critically acclaimed Whiplash. “I’m from the Northeast; it just made me stronger,” he says.
He enrolled at NYU and made some friends. Then, when Teller was 20, a buddy lost control of the car they were in and the vehicle ended up flipping eight times. Teller was thrown 40 feet. “The EMT told me people in these kinds of accidents die 99.9 percent of the time,” he says. He persevered through endless laser surgeries, with casting directors thinking the scars left him as less-than-leading-man material. Teller just kept his head down. He went through firefighter training for 2017’s Only the Brave and boot camp for Thank You for Your Service. “I don’t think anything bonds people like collective suffering,” says Teller on our first Zoom call. It taught him grit and resilience, virtues that would come in handy as he tackled physically and emotionally draining roles.
So there was little hesitation when it came to prepping for Top Gun: Maverick. Well, there wasn’t hesitation at doing the work, more like a pause as he considered whether he wanted to be that big a star. Tom Cruise’s 1986 original remains the U. S. Navy’s greatest promotional film. Teller wasn’t sure if that kind of scrutiny was for him, and yes, he realizes that sounds weird. “I don’t want this to come out the wrong way, but there was a part of me that didn’t know if I wanted to be a part of something that could bring that much attention and success to me,” he says. He Zooms from a table in a white T-shirt and baseball cap, with the afternoon glow of the L. A. sun behind him. “Everybody views success differently. For me, it didn’t necessarily mean being a part of the biggest movie.”
But Thomas Cruise Mapother IV can be a persuasive man. He had the Top Gun script couriered to Teller while he and Sperry vacationed on Kauai. There was an under-the-radar trip to Florida, where Cruise (who stars as Maverick in both movies) convinced Teller that he was perfect for the role of Rooster, the son of the late, lamented Goose, Maverick’s copilot in the original film.
There was another motivator. Teller comes from a family of soldiers. His grandfather was a Marine, and his uncle served in Vietnam. “He got MS toward the end of his life and he thought it was penance for what he did over there,” says Teller quietly about his uncle. Many of his boyhood friends have served, and one is deployed overseas. Based on his conversations with them and his experience filming Thank You for Your Service, Teller believes America is squandering some of what binds us all together.
“You wanna give a voice to these guys,” he says. “In the wars that we fight now, our military comes from very specific parts of the country and socioeconomic classes. We’re losing that connection between civilians and military and our veterans.”
So the work began. Teller torqued his equilibrium and sense of well-being for seven weeks before shooting started. He worked out with trainer Jason Walsh, adding 20 pounds of muscle to his six-foot, 180-pound frame. He sat in the back of a Cessna jet while the pilot let the plane stall and everyone hoped to hell he could start it up before they made a crater in the California desert. He endured the “dunker,” the naval torture chamber in which you are strapped to a chair, blindfolded, dropped into the drink, spun upside down, and forced to find your way out before panic and drowning overtake you. He made it through no problem. “I never puked,” he says.
Teller discovered being a 21st-century Navy pilot was less about being a sky warrior and more about being an aeronautical nerd genius. The F/A-18 Super Hornet that the Top Guns pilot is a computerized flying death machine, and aviators must keep track of mission computers and missiles in equal measure. “There is none of that alpha bravado,” says Teller. “Flying these jets is so hard. The difference between a squadron pilot and a Top Gun pilot is how well they understand the plane.”
Today, Teller faces perhaps his toughest Top Gun challenge. Because of the pandemic, he is housebound, but he must finish some key scenes. He hushes his dog, gathers a blanket and his laptop, and heads into one of the closets in his home. For most of the morning, as Rooster, he has a one-way conversation with the hard-driving Maverick and quiet moments with his fellow newbie pilots. Finally, his voice and laptop battery drained, an exhausted Teller emerges from three hours of overdubbing lines for the final edit of the film.
“I think it sounded better than some looping I’ve done in studios,” he says, laughing. “And now we’ll see what happens.” This was in March. Miles Teller had no idea how long he would have to wait.
THERE'S A Jerry Garcia quote that Teller likes that goes like this: “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do.” I ask him why he likes it so much. He hems and haws for a minute. “I don’t know, man. I just think a lot of actors and styles of acting are getting very homogenized. It’s hard to stick out.” He hesitates for a moment. Teller has been accused of bouts of self-grandiosity before, so he chooses his words carefully. “It was instilled in me at a young age by my mom just to be comfortable in your own skin, and don’t compare yourself to other people.” He lets slip a wide grin. “And honestly, who gives a shit what other people think about you?”
Teller had an unlikely mentor on the be-your-own-man front. He had been a fan of Kobe Bryant’s since he was a kid, because of their shared Philly-area roots, and read that the basketball star was a fan of Whiplash, although it wasn’t clear whether he identified with Teller’s Andrew or Simmons’s Terence.
Teller wrote on Twitter that Kobe liking one of his movies was basically the highlight of his life, and they began communicating via social media and talking in L. A. They had a meaningful exchange after a Lakers game shortly before Bryant retired. Teller recounts it with sadness, our conversation occurring not long after Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash:
Teller: “I read about where you talked about studying animals. To learn from them and how they can conquer their environment and how predators work and how they adapt and overcome.”
Bryant (smiling): “Miles, not just animals. Plants. Start studying plants. The world is your library.”
Teller exhales a bit. “I’m going to always remember that.”
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE'S, Teller’s world got smaller in 2020. At first, he loved it. He played long games of Call of Duty with his buddies and made Buffalo wings for his new bride. “I used to carry along this deep fryer when we first met from place to place,” says Teller. “Now I grill them. It seems like I’m always on a diet.”
He insists quarantine life isn’t much different from his normal downtime between movies with Sperry. “We just hang out. She keeps me calm. It’s pretty great.”
But one month stretched into two and then three. Top Gun: Maverick got pushed back twice and will now premiere on July 2, 2021, meaning it will debut two years after principal photography was completed. Another beloved Teller project, Not Without Hope, about four football players lost at sea, went away because of scheduling issues, and Teller isn’t sure if it will come back. “That’s on pause right now,” he says glumly of the film, which Ciara and Russell Wilson planned to produce. “One of the players was from my town, so I really want to do it. We’ll just have to see what happens.”
To pass the pandemic time, Teller and his wife did their Mike and Carol Brady thing, cooking steak and pasta and steering clear of the chaos that filled American cities this past summer. They did some home-improvement projects that would permanently remind them of the year the world stood still.
“Keleigh and I both worked on our backyard and did some landscaping,” says Teller. “We planted a lemon tree, hydrangeas, and a rose garden.” He gives a little laugh. “Since we were staring at our backyard a whole lot more than usual, we wanted to add color.”
But there is some hope. We talked again in mid-October, and Teller was packing up for an extended trip to Australia for Spiderhead, his first pandemic-era film, based on a George Saunders short story. Appropriately, it is a dystopian thriller set in a prison. He will have a long flight and then 14 days of hotel quarantine per Australian law. Fortunately, his wife is coming along for the two-month shoot, so their daily life will essentially remain the same.
“I’m with her now from when I wake up to the moment I go to bed,” says Teller. “We have a lot of friends whose relationships got put under a magnifying glass during these times, but we are really great.” He smiles with all the optimism of the freshly wed. “Once you get married and you make that ultimate commitment, life is just a lot less stressful. You just know that person is always going to be there.”
Adorable! But what about the Top Gun deferral and the postponed projects? Sure, talent will win in the end, but it must be frustrating to have your breakout role on permanent delay. Right? Teller says nope.
“I’m not one of those people who worry about if people don’t see me every six months,” he says. “I don’t feel like my career is dying. It’s going to happen when it happens and that’s fine.”
Sounds more like Phil Jackson than Kobe Bryant, but we’ll allow it.
This story appears in the January 2021 issue of Men's Health.
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