“Thank You for Your Service” star Miles Teller was shaken by that Esquire article that labeled him as “kind of a d-ck,” because contrary to what the article said, he does care what people think about him.
“If how that story made me look was how I really was, I’d think I was the biggest douchebag too,” the actor said in a new interview with Vulture. “The main idea in that story was that Miles Teller doesn’t give a rat’s a– what you think of him. That’s really not true. I absolutely do care what people think about me.”
That said, the actor added, “I can’t put much weight into whether the public likes me because the more important thing is that, as an actor, I can truly say that there’s not a single director or actor who I’ve worked with who’d have a bad thing to say about me. I’ve never missed a day of work. I’ve never not known a line. So I feel good about where I am.”
The actor said the profile did prompt some soul-searching — just a little anyway. “If you really let that kind of thing get to you, man, it’ll get stuck in your head,” he said. “And when I put my head to my pillow at night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I honestly felt like I was behaving like an a–hole to people…. I know who I am, and it’s not who I was in that story.”
The 2015 Esquire article started with the sentence, “You’re sitting across from Miles Teller at the Luminary restaurant in Atlanta and trying to figure out if he’s a d-ck.” Later, the author bluntly wrote, “so yeah, he is kind of a d-ck.”
In the Vulture piece, the actor also spoke about playing parts in big-budget films versus independent movies.
“It’s never, never, never just for money, but it is okay to do something bigger budget that then lets you pay off student loans or pay off your parent’s mortgage,” he added. “There’s a human side to show business that people at home don’t think about. If I did a role that — my uncle’s quadriplegic — and if I did a role that meant I could buy him a handicap van, or I could take my grandparents to Ireland … I can go to bed at night just fine.”
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Of course, “Fantastic Four” and the “Divergent” series come to mind. Of the former, which was a big-budget bomb widely panned, Teller said he “didn’t know it would turn out how it did” and that he didn’t have a lot of control over where the movie was going, which is why he believes many actors go into producing: “It’s frustrating to be such a collaborator on the set but then nobody asks you s— about the film once you’re not on set anymore.”
Teller also added that a statement he made about “Divergent” was another “thing that got taken out of context.” Teller told W Magazine in 2014 that “Divergent” had made him feel “dead inside” and that he had taken the film for “business reasons.”
“I was talking about doing five movies in 15 months or something,” he explained. “I was saying I was burnt out from all the work, not because of anything about ‘Divergent.’ … Why would I ever sign onto something and then badmouth it? It doesn’t make any sense.”
But what is one role he wants for himself?
“I want to do, like, a ‘Tootsie,’” the actor said, referring to Sydney Pollack’s 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as an out-of-work actor who poses as a woman.
Read the full interview here.