Miles Teller: ‘I’m so proud of my Irish roots, it’s embarrassing’

If I worked for Tourism Ireland, I’d do whatever it takes to get Miles Teller on camera. “I’ve always been so proud of my Irish roots, it’s embarrassing,” gushes the young actor. “And it did not disappoint. Of everywhere I’ve been, it’s my favourite country.”

The feeling may be mutual. He was recognised more in Killarney “ . . . than anywhere else in the world”, he notes, in the middle of an exciting travelogue that took in Cobh, Kilkenny, Dublin and Galway. He’s delighted to have done the ancestral bit – his mother’s maiden name is Dean – and thrilled to have glimpsed the drama school that Michael Fassbender attended from the bus window.

Hell, by the time he’s done talking, I want to visit Ireland.

Here’s the thing. Miles Teller told me about this trip before it happened.

Two years ago, just as Whiplash premiered at the London Film Festival, Teller was the talk of the town, a guy who has proved his box-office worth with several broad comedies (Project X, 21 & Over), and who had simultaneously wowed critics with mesmerising turns in Rabbit Hole and The Spectacular Now.

So he responded to all the subsequent Whiplash hoopla and Oscar buzz by taking his grandparents all around Ireland. Aww. That ought to have marked him out as a good guy, right? Or so you'd think.

Today, for our second meeting, he's back in London for the British premiere of Bleed for This, a splendid new boxing biopic, starring Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Katey Sagal and Ciarán Hinds. He's still the same boyish, eager-to-please joker. A real-world Ferris Bueller. But this time around, he's a good deal more cautious with his wording.

When he talks about Vinny Pazienza, a boxer who risked paralysis to return to the ring, Teller can’t think of anything he’d be willing to risk use of the legs for. “I want to be a good brother and a good husband and have a good life.”

He freezes, suddenly, for fear of causing offence. “I don’t mean that you can’t live a good life that way,” he says, apologetically. “My uncle is a paraplegic.”

Later, he tells me about a recent viewing of Talk to Me, Marlon, a documentary portrait of the late Marlon Brandon. Teller freezes again. "I'm not comparing myself with Brando," he says, with a dismissive wave of the hand. "I never would."

Who could blame him for his sudden reticence? Last year, hatchet to hand, Esquire profiled the 29-year-old under the heading: "Miles Teller Is Young, Talented, and Doesn't Give a Rat's Ass What You Think". There followed a 5,000-word dissertation on the star's supposed "dickishness".

“When you work in movies, you get scrutinised for a lot of things that are . . . complete nonsense,” he says, hesitantly. “Even magazines that are supposed to be these pillars of journalism are producing clickbait material. It’s unfortunate that you make a movie and sometimes the story becomes less about the movie and all about you. Except it’s not really you. It’s just some version of you.”

That offending article spawned dozens of "Top Ten Dickish Things About Miles Teller" listicles. And so, when Teller was replaced by Ryan Gosling in La La Land – director Damien Chazelle's follow-up to Whiplash – the scuttlebutts came thick and fast. Who had dumped whom? And why?

"There are a lot of rumours out there and I don't want to respond to them," he says. "I will say the stuff that is getting printed about why it didn't work out is utter garbage. La La Land is a great film. And Bleed for This is a great film. I think that whatever happened in the four months before production shouldn't cast a shadow on either of the projects. The reports that I turned down four million dollars? I'm reading those and thinking: 'Am I crazy?' Such an absurd amount of money."

Physical and psychological effort
It's not as if Teller needed the gig. In the past year, he has featured in Fantastic Four, War Dogs, Get a Job and two films from the Divergent sequence.

Still, Bleed for This required more physical and psychological effort than all these other projects combined. The story of five-time lightweight boxing champion Vinny "the Pazmanian Devil" Pazienza, the Martin Scorsese-produced film charts the Rhode Island pugilist's recovery from near-paralysis to a title challenge. On reading the script, Teller didn't think he'd make the weight – or rather both weights. Pazienza competed in two divisions.

Eight gruelling months in the gym while cutting bread and alcohol seems to have done the trick. No wonder his girlfriend Keleigh Sperry complained that he had become boring. He weighed in 168 pounds with six per cent body fat just ahead of the shoot.

“I learned a lot about my body,” he laughs.

Did he confer much with Vinny?

“When I was prepping for it, I didn’t really talk to Vinny at all,” he says. “I just felt very sheepish. I was so far away from playing a five-time champion boxer at the time the script came to me. I didn’t want him to see me boxing. I didn’t want him to see the shape I was in. Oh my God. What would he have thought? Probably that ‘this guys going to bury my reputation’. So I watched a lot of video. Mostly I listened, rather than watched. I listened to hours and hours of him. Just studying his voice. I didn’t want to associate that with mannerisms.

“So I didn’t actually meet Vinny until we flew to Rhode Island to shoot. I was really nervous. I had such a tremendous amount of respect for him at that point. Here’s a guy who has every doctor, every authority, tell him that something is impossible. And he does it anyway. They say never meet your idols. Maybe that’s true. Unless they’re Vinny. He won’t let you down.”

Was he much of a fighter before?

“Well, I’m from Florida, so fighting can happen accidentally,” he smiles. “I did sports and kickboxing growing up. I like competition. But I think if you can avoid getting hit in the face – whether for a job or not – that’s a good thing. I was usually pretty good at talking myself out of things. But at the same time, talking myself into things.”

Four different states
Miles Alexander Teller was born in Pennsylvania in 1987, to Merry, a real estate agent, and Michael, a nuclear power plant engineer. His father's job meant that Michael and his older sisters Erin and Dana moved around. "Pennsylvania, then Florida, then Delaware, New Jersey. By the time I got to Florida for middle school, I had already lived in four different states. That's where I met my friends."

He’s had those same eight friends ever since, although they did give him quite a bit of ribbing when he joined the drama club at high school.

“I wasn’t somebody who wanted to be an actor,” he says. “I just did some satirical bits for the school TV channel and I joined drama club at the end of my sophomore year. My friends were sarcastic. ‘Oh. You’re in drama now. That’s cool, man.’ They never came to any of my plays or anything. Now they always want to come on set. Especially if I’m working with a pretty girl.”

His older sister was a budding country star – “the most talented person I have ever been around” – until she shied away from the “industry bullshit” that came with the job.

Miles has been more fortunate, although he is a little sorry for his mum. As the youngest of the three Teller kids, he says, it was expected that he'd stay closest to home. Instead, he left the Floridian borough of Citrus County for NYU, where, in his final year, he secured his big break. He was cast in John Cameron Mitchell's 2010 film Rabbit Hole, in which he played a high-school student who accidentally runs over a child. For that director, the scars on Teller's face and neck – still faintly visible – were an asset. "It tells a secret," he claimed.

The marks are from a 2007 accident, during which, Teller, aged 20, was ejected out the window of a car going 80mph. Oddly, Bleed for This is the latest of several projects in which Miles Teller plays a car-crash victim.

“It’s been brought up before,” he nods. “I didn’t realise it for a long time. But car accidents show up in a lot of films I’ve done. Obviously, I have my own experiences with car crashes. My own when I was 20. And two of my best friends passed away when I was 21 in separate car accidents. I think... I guess its part of the American DNA. I think you can talk to any American and if they haven’t been in a serious car accident, they know somebody who has been. It’s a tragic part of growing up. For a lot of us.”

- Bleed for This opens December 2nd