How Miles Teller Drummed His Way to the Top
I used to buy weed right there,” the actor Miles Teller says, pointing cheerfully down a sun-dappled street in New York’s East Village on a Sunday afternoon. “This dude’s name was Zach. I met him playing basketball at the NYU gym.” Teller, 27, is in town for the New York Film Festival screening of his new movie, Whiplash, but that’s not until later, after a dinner that he’ll probably skip in favor of lounging around his room in the Bowery Hotel, watching football and “laying on my girlfriend’s ass.”
Until then, he has decided to amble around his old New York stomping ground and ponder his past. There’s the joint where he’d frequently chow down on Philly cheese steak, there’s his favorite cheese shop (“You could get a quarter wheel of brie for a dollar fifty!”) and there’s the dorm of a girl he once dated. “It was one of the few where you could have your own bedroom — you didn’t have to share it,” he tells me, with a little half-grin. “So that was a big perk, obviously.” Suddenly he stops in front of a theater where the sign out front broadcasts the title of his not-so-romantic romantic comedy. “Hey! Two Night Stand is playing there! It’s only in five theaters in the whole country, so. . .” He snaps a picture of the marquee.
On the surface, Teller seems like the sort of guy for whom only five theaters would be totally fine and excellent. Tromping down the sidewalk, he exudes the easy-going dudeness for which he’s typically been cast — a high-fiving, wisecracking bro who can charm his way out of mischief of his own making. Today the effect is amplified by a backward baseball cap, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and faded jeans. “I feel like such a hillbilly. You know what it is? It’s the Croaklies.” But looks deceive: Teller is quick to explain that the one thing he shares with his character in Whiplash is a keening ambition. “I want to be talked about the way people talk about Hoffman and De Niro and Pacino,” he announces.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle and shot in only 19 days, Whiplash takes place in a fictitious Julliard-like music conservatory where a Machiavellian teacher (played by J.K. Simmons) inspires fear and genius, in that order, and students sacrifice themselves on the altar of the perfect jazz tempo. In preparation for his role, Chazelle told Teller to not exercise and to stay out of the sun. The actor, whose musical skills then pretty much amounted to jamming around with his roommates (“I mean, I could very well be in a Bob Seeger cover band”), also submitted himself to a drum regimen almost as intense as his character’s. “I would have felt like such a douchebag if I was doing this movie and couldn’t drum,” he says, seriously. “When I first started bleeding on the drumstick, I felt validity.” But more than that, Teller transformed himself into the sort of tortured artist that he freely admits he’s never had to be. The kid has always been lucky. He admittedly hasn’t always been so ambitious. “I don’t see very much of myself at all, if any, in Whiplash. There’s stuff that [my character] is doing where I’m like, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever made that face in my life.'”