Notorious Celebrity Interviews: Miles Teller for Esquire 2015 (An ONTD Original)
Get ready: this is one of the most memorable, career-wrecking, embarrassing celebrity interviews in recent history. It's Miles Teller's interview for Esquire in 2015. Miles was hot shit, Hollywood's unconventional it-boy after Whiplash. But then he gave this interview.
"You're sitting across from Miles Teller at the Luminary restaurant in Atlanta and trying to figure out if he's a dick."
And that's just the first line.
Miles Teller Is Young, Talented, and Doesn't Give a Rat's Ass What You Think
By Anna Peele
- He makes lewd comments to the waitress:
You've just told him, by way of making conversation, that according to legend the champagne coupe in your hand is shaped like Marie Antoinette's left breast, and he tells you the highball glass is modeled after his cock. Then he tells the waitress the same thing.
- He brags about his hair and thinks that he's much better-looking than he is:
After the waitress leaves, shrugging off his comment about the highball glass, you ask him about his hair. He's brought up how nice it is in more than one interview. It's a little defensive, like maybe he's making up for not being the best-looking, or sometimes even the third-best-looking, guy in any given movie he's in.
"I was thinking about that today, how I probably think I'm better-looking than the public thinks I am," he says with a laugh, like it's funny that he's willed himself into a higher tier of male beauty through limitless confidence. "I was in one of these forums about a film I did, and it's like, 'This dude is so ugly! How does he get fucking parts?' 'Well, he's not, like, traditionally handsome, but . . .' And that's kind of what it is. Maybe it's because I came from a small town, but I always did well for myself."
- The interviewer has to cut the dinner meat for him:
The pork looks great and you offer him some. "I'll take a little bit," he says, sawing at it. Then: "I can't cut this." You have to cut his meat for him, a man who ten minutes earlier showed you an iPhone photo of his back muscles to prove how strong he is.
- He comes at the interviewer for gently teasing him about having to cut the pork for him:
"What are you, bullying me now?" he says. His goading is a habit, compulsive, almost athletic. "I didn't know they fucking put marble on top of their pork belly."
- He loves talking about other actors and his "oeuvre:"
Then it's back to his oeuvre. Or rather a dissertation on other people's oeuvres and how they might affect the oeuvre of Miles Teller.
He has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the careers of other actors. He goes into an animated rant about Leo and Bradley and Jake Gyllenhaal and Vince Vaughn, and how it's almost impossible to win an Academy Award as a man under thirty, and Tom Hanks, and Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeff Bridges, Dustin Hoffman. "But if I'm really homing in on the dramatic performance right now, it's probably Christian Bale or it's Joaq."
Oh, for fuck's sake. Joaq?
- He negs his two-time costar, Aaron Eckhart:
He parses yet another career that isn't the one he wants. Aaron Eckhart was one of the leads in Rabbit Hole, and Teller was so intimidated he could barely get through his first scene with him. But recently, he worked with him again, in the boxing movie Bleed for This. "Now in Bleed for This he's my trainer, the overweight, kind of supporting character actor. He idolizes actors like Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson, but he's just very antipaparazzi," Teller says. "It's hard to get to the right position, to be somebody who is commercially successful and critically acclaimed.
- Also, remember when he was recorded dancing his ass off while (allegedly) high?
A widely circulated TMZ clip from earlier this summer shows Teller at the BottleRock Napa Valley music and wine festival. In the video, he seems to be performing a solo line dance with intricate footwork and purposeful, lawn-crossing, Mick Jagger strutting. There's a shirt toss-and-catch. It's hard not to assume powerful hallucinogens were involved in its choreography.
- He DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT! REALLY!
"I don't give a shit," he says, tough guy.... You wonder how much he really doesn't give a shit. Because it kind of seems like no one gives more of a shit about what he does. Enough that, yeah, he has to be kind of a dick about it. How can you not like that?
- Did we mention the rape joke?
He orders you an Uber. You tell him about some recent sexual-assault accusations leveled at the company's drivers, so he tells you he's requesting "Do not rape" service
- His tattoos just sound douchey:
He is wearing a pool-blue V-neck that shows off the Roman-numeral tattoo on his arm, a reference to the thirty-two-ounce beers his high school friends were forced to buy because forties were not available in Florida. He explains that everyone in the "32 Crew" got this tattoo after a night at the High Octane Saloon from a man they bribed out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to needle crooked X's and I's onto their biceps.
- The final word:
He gives you a hug and goes off to contribute to the cache or catalog or canon or whatever the fuck you call it and charm the world with his dickishness.
Teller responded to the interview on Twitter:
@esquire couldn't be more wrong. I don't think there's anything cool or entertaining about being a dick or an asshole. Very misrepresenting
- Miles Teller (@Miles_Teller) August 5, 2015
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Read more in this series: notorious interviews with Chris Evans, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé, Channing Tatum, and Cara Delevingne.
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