The Tragic True-Life Story Of Miles Teller

It doesn't matter what kind of film fan you are — you've definitely seen Miles Teller before. After starring in short films, Teller broke into the movie scene in 2010 with "Rabbit Hole," and it didn't take him long to become a household name. Movies like "Footloose," "Project X," and "The Spectacular Now" introduced Teller to a wider audience, but 2014's "Whiplash" was truly his breakout moment.

Teller has been in movies both good and bad, but he always brings his best to his roles. Whether he's starring in an Oscar-winning picture or the third installment of a collapsing franchise, Teller makes sure to bring empathy to his characters and passion to his performances. Teller's never been one to back down from a challenge, and he's gone through some grueling things for his roles, which is why his hard work always shines through.

Thanks to "Top Gun: Maverick," Teller is finally a household name, but his journey to stardom has been anything but straightforward. Part of Teller's determination to make a name for himself in acting comes from the fact that, appearances aside, he hasn't lived a charmed life at all. Like anyone else, Teller has faced some real struggles, but he's got a knack for using his life's most tragic moments as fuel for his creative endeavors.

Tragedy struck Miles Teller's life well before he embarked on his acting career. In 2007, Teller was in his junior year of college at New York University, and he went with some friends to a music festival. Teller was a passenger on the way back from the festival when the car he was riding in flipped going 80 miles per hour. He was tossed 30 feet from the vehicle, and the accident left him with scars all along his face, neck, and chin. If you've never noticed the scars before, that's because Teller's underwent a ton of treatment to have them lightened. "I got a lot of laser surgery on my face, like what they use for getting rid of tattoos. Like, very painful," Teller once told Esquire.

The laser treatment went on for two years, and even though now it seems inevitable that the scars wouldn't get in the way of Teller's career, at the time it wasn't so obvious. Teller told an interviewer for Vulture, "When I first was going out on auditions, literally every room that I walked into they would say 'Oh my god! What happened to your face?' They'd just walk up to me and say that." The reactions Teller got were demoralizing, but eventually he landed in front of John Cameron Mitchell, who saw a way to incorporate the scars into Teller's character. The director gave Teller his first feature-length role in 2010's "Rabbit Hole."

The facial scars weren't the only effect Miles Teller felt from that accident. The incident also ended up costing him most of the friends that he'd made through his college years. In an interview with Esquire, Teller explained that he didn't blame his roommate, who was the driver, for the accident, but it still pushed the two of them into a bigger confrontation. "I was racking up all these medical bills," Teller said in the interview, "so we had to sue his insurance because he was driving. It's not like we're suing him; we're suing his insurance."

Teller's roommate didn't see things the same way, he said, and told Teller that they couldn't be friends anymore. Teller said he felt as though he were being blamed for an accident he had nothing to do with. Their falling out rippled into the rest of their friend group. Most of Teller's friends, the actor said, took his roommate's side and moved in with him shortly after the incident. Luckily Teller was still close with his high school friend group, so he didn't become completely isolated after the accident.

After getting into a brutal car accident, Miles Teller was due a break from tragedy, but unfortunately, as they say, tragedy comes in threes. Less than a year after Teller's accident, a motorcycle crash killed his childhood friend Nick. A car blew through an intersection and hit Teller's friend, who ended up at the hospital in critical condition. "I was in the hospital when they pulled the plug on my one friend," Teller told Esquire. "I knew what it felt like to hug a mother the day she lost her son."

A month later, yet another car accident killed Teller's friend Beau. "I was actually sitting next to Beau at Nick's funeral," Teller said in an interview with The Guardian. In the space of just a year, Teller nearly died, turned 21, and then lost two of his closest friends. All of that happened before Teller had really begun acting professionally, but that emotional energy is something that has stuck with him all these years later. "It'll definitely impact on me for the rest of my life for sure," Teller said.

Miles Teller had a fantastic run of movies after making his feature-length acting debut in "Rabbit Hole." He went from that movie to high-profile films like "Footloose," "Project X," and "Whiplash" before landing an ongoing role in the "Divergent" franchise. "Divergent" might have seemed like a big opportunity for Teller, but there are some signs that he didn't enjoy working on the film. In an interview with W Magazine, Teller said (via the Los Angeles Times), "I didn't have an interesting part, and I'd taken the film for business reasons." He later walked back that statement on X, then Twitter, and clarified to the Los Angeles Times that by "business reasons" he meant the chance to play a villain in an international movie alongside Shailene Woodley.

After course-correcting his comments, Teller went on to star in the "Divergent" sequel "Insurgent," and from there the series started running into its own trouble. "Insurgent" debuted to terrible reviews, and a year later its sequel, "Allegiant," did the same. The series was supposed to culminate in a fourth movie called "Ascendant," but Lionsgate decided to shift the finale away from a theatrical release. The actors weren't thrilled with the new plan, and eventually the "Divergent" series fell apart before ever reaching the finish line. "Divergent" is far from the only YA adaptation that's flopped, but the fact that Teller almost got to see the series through to the end makes this all the more tragic.

Starring in a young adult series didn't work out for Miles Teller, and neither did diving into a comic book universe. The year after Teller appeared in "Divergent," he made his debut as Reed Richards, one of the Marvel universe's greatest heroes. Directed by Josh Trank, 2015's "Fantastic Four" isn't part of the MCU, and it tried to tell a grittier story about Marvel's first family than the 2005 adaptation did. By most metrics, Trank's take on the Fantastic Four utterly failed. The movie barely managed to break even on its $120 million budget, and on Rotten Tomatoes it has a stunning 9% approval rating.

"Fantastic Four" was the beginning and end of Teller's foray into being a superhero. The movie's reception would be enough to sour any actor on the genre, but Teller reportedly had a rough time while working on the film. He and Trank constantly butted heads, and a rumor spread that the two of them nearly got into a physical altercation while on set. Trank has tried to downplay those rumors in interviews, but Teller has been more coy while talking about his experience on the movie. He told Newsweek,"If something happens on set, I think you should be professional about it. I don't think you need to talk too much about it."

Teller hasn't chased down another superhero role since then, but he confirmed to Comicbook.com that the notorious failure of "Fantastic Four" hasn't destroyed his admiration for the genre. When asked if he'd do a "Fantastic Four" sequel, he told JoBlo, "Yeah, for sure. I loved the cast, I loved the characters. I think it's such an interesting dynamic."

Miles Teller was still early in his career when Damien Chazelle's "Whiplash" put him in the spotlight in a way he'd never been before. The movie, which won three Oscars, gave Teller a huge platform. It seemed only natural that he'd want to work with Chazelle again on the director's next project, "La La Land."

For a while, Teller was supposed to play the lead alongside Emma Watson. When he lost out on the role, a report claimed that he'd been passed over because he demanded a $6 million paycheck after being offered $4 million. Teller later claimed that the story was completely false and that he'd been fully on board for the movie until getting a surprise text from his agent saying that Chazelle wanted to go with someone else.

Losing out on a massive role is bad enough, but having the rumor hit his reputation made the situation so much worse for Teller. Years later he told Vulture, "I can 1,000 percent assure you that if there was a part I wanted to play, I would not turn down four million dollars to do it." Teller didn't explain what really caused him to lose the role, but he did say that he fought for the part until the very end. "I'll go to my grave knowing that when push came to shove I expressed extreme loyalty to Damien and that movie," he continued. "That's sorta all I can say."

In interviews Miles Teller often tries to put his best foot forward and present himself as a hardworking actor who focuses most of his attention on his craft. There's absolutely truth in that characterization, but the world has also gotten to witness another side of Teller. In June 2017, Teller was arrested by San Diego law enforcement after appearing to be drunk in public.

The news framed Teller as a bit of a party animal, and that might be why he took to social media to try and soften the story. "Went down to SD to see my buddy before he deployed," Teller wrote in a post on X, adding, "I wasn't arrested I was detained bc there was no evidence to charge me with a crime." That doesn't exactly line up with the story that the police told, however. Variety reported that police said Teller had the choice of going to a detox center to sober up but became argumentative and uncooperative, leading to his arrest. As far as stories involving celebrities and the police, this scandal is pretty tame. We all get in our own way sometimes, but the fact that this happened so publicly helped contribute to fans not hearing from Teller for a while. 

In late 2021, Miles Teller found himself back in the news after being assaulted while on a trip to Maui with his wife and their friends Shailene Woodley and Aaron Rodgers. Teller and his wife were reportedly eating dinner when Teller went to the bathroom and was confronted by two men. He was punched in the face, and the story began to get even stranger.

Not long after Teller was assaulted, TMZ reported that the assailant was a wedding planner Teller and his wife had hired to plan their 2019 ceremony. According to that story, the wedding planner was upset because he believed Teller owed him $60,000. That story was quickly refuted by Teller's wife who, according to The Mercury News, posted on her Instagram story that Teller had been assaulted by two strangers. "It seems these same men have done this to many people and we appreciate your support Maui," she said (via People). "This is now a criminal investigation."

Later on his own social media in an X post, Teller confirmed that he'd been attacked by two men and that he didn't know either of them. Later reporting indicated that though Teller might not have known the men, one of them was apparently married to the wedding planner who'd worked with Teller in 2019. The man who allegedly punched Teller was eventually charged with assault, and this entire strange incident slowly slid out of public view.

"Top Gun: Maverick" was one of the biggest and most widely successful films of Miles Teller's career. Filming it was also one of the biggest challenges that Teller faced as an actor. Teller and his costars really took to the skies for various shots throughout the movie, and while they were in the air they had to operate their own cameras, hold their attention on the scene itself, and keep their lunch down while flying through the air. It was a unique experience, but Teller was less than enthused, telling TechRadar, "I like when other people are doing their job and I only have to worry about acting."

The technicality of filming "Top Gun" was actually the least Teller had to worry about while working on the movie. His bigger challenge was dealing with a horrible allergic reaction that immediately sent him to the doctor. Coming back from a flight, Teller realized that his entire body was covered in hives. He got blood drawn and discovered that the reaction came from pesticides and jet fuel that had worked their way into his body. 

Teller said on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" that the next day on set Tom Cruise asked him what the doctors found out. "I was like, 'Well, Tom, it turns out I have jet fuel in my blood,'" Teller said. "And without even skipping a beat, Tom just goes, 'Yeah, I was born with it, kid.'" Ultimately the jet fuel didn't do any lasting damage to Teller, but he's not trying to get back in the cockpit anytime soon.

All the way back in 2015, just as Miles Teller's career was really beginning to take off, the actor sat down for an interview with Esquire. That piece offered some interesting insights into Teller's approach to acting and some heart-wrenching details of his personal life, like the car accident that left him scarred and the loss of his childhood friends. It also presented the actor in a fairly negative light, which can best be summed up by a sentence that appears in the first few paragraphs of the piece: "So yeah, he is kind of a [d***]."

Teller later described his personal reaction to the piece in an interview with The Guardian. "Oh, I felt frickin' helpless, I felt extremely misrepresented, I felt a little angry," he said. He went on to say that the piece caused him to think more carefully when speaking to reporters and that he'd sometimes purposefully try to present himself as being boring so there'd be less to say about him.

That piece colored Teller's reputation for years, and it's something he's reflected on over and over again. "Maybe some people have been turned off of me because I take what I'm doing pretty seriously and I don't feel the need to charm everybody," Teller once told Vulture. The piece didn't hold back Teller's career by any means, but it still left a mark on him. "I absolutely do care what people think about me," Teller said, but that piece helped teach him a hard lesson. "I can't put much weight into whether the public likes me."