Miles Teller Admits He's Still Upset Over Last Year's Esquire Profile: 'I Felt a Little Angry'
Miles Teller probably isn’t over-the-moon thrilled with the box-office performance of his latest, War Dogs, which debuted this weekend to a modest $14.3 million. Nonetheless, while doing the promo rounds for that based-on-a-true-story comedy, which pairs him with Jonah Hill as unlikely arms dealers in Afghanistan, the 29-year-old actor revealed that what really continues to upset him is last year’s Esquire profile, during which he was portrayed as a “dick.”
Related: Miles Teller on ‘Divergent’ TV Movie: ‘It Caught Us All by Surprise’
In a new chat with The Guardian, Teller states that he was rankled by that Esquire article’s contention that he was a surly jerk who thought himself in competition with contemporaries like Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Joaquin Phoenix (who he refers to in the piece as “Joaq”). Even a year later, the actor admits:
“Oh, I felt frickin’ helpless, I felt extremely misrepresented, I felt a little angry. For the average person, they are reading this article, they haven’t met you, they’re like, ‘Oh Miles is an asshole. You didn’t hear it? You didn’t read that Esquire? Yeah, she said he was an asshole — he must be!’”
Still, despite feeling burned by the article, Teller confesses that it hasn’t made him considerably more private than he was before, and that what you see is what you get:
“I’d say that you get a little more guarded but I’m actually not. Certain times I’ll choose my words very carefully and maybe come off a little more boring. But I also think that’s why people — certain people — do relate to me: because there is no agenda, honestly. I was raised middle-class in a small town. I have all my same friends from high school. I’m close with my family. I’m dating a normal girl. So I want to feel people think I’m a man of the people. Because I feel that way.”
To read the rest of Teller’s thoughts on that Esquire cover story, as well as on pot-smoking and his breakout role in Whiplash, check out The Guardian’s feature here.
