Fantastic Four star Miles Teller sat down for an interview with Esquire magazine– and let’s just say things did not go well for him. “Our latest cover star is on a quest for greatness. Sometimes that can involve a bit of dickishness too” – reads the headline. And it goes downhill from there. Here are a few choice excerpts.
You’re sitting across from Miles Teller at the Luminary restaurant in Atlanta and trying to figure out if he’s a dick. 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.
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.”
You take stock. The nose is crooked, the eyelids fleshy, the chin soft, the cheeks mottled with flush. He’s right—he has good hair, thick and cowlicked and widow’s-peaked. He’s tall and solidly muscled, with a nice tan from filming Todd Phillips’s big-budget comedy Arms and the Dudes with Jonah Hill in Miami a few months ago.
He’s appealingly attainable, a good-looking guy who shouldn’t know he’s good-looking, who should believe the commenters, except that he dates a twenty-two-year-old model/aspiring swimsuit designer/professional girlfriend who thinks Teller is attractive enough to have permanently monogrammed her perfect ass with his initials.
The waitress delivers the entrées, scallops for him and pork belly for you. 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 wants you to cut it small. “I don’t have back teeth. I literally have four teeth.” Not true. He’s right, though, this pork belly is really hard to cut. But still. “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.”
“I used to get this milk tea in college at the Asian market M2M when I was high,” he says, as if you’re supposed to know what milk tea is. “It was five bucks. Me and my buddies prided ourselves. We were like, ‘Nobody smokes this much pot. I guarantee you can ask anyone in this dorm, man… we smoke a lot.’ I didn’t do a single play when I was in college, because all I wanted to do was smoke pot. I did zero extracurricular activities so I could get high. I stopped when I started doing movies and went to L. A. because I was like, I can’t get a phone call and not answer it.”
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, […].
Now, admittedly Miles sometimes comes across as a bit of an ass-hat, but hey –I put that down to FFF Syndrome. First Flush of Fame Syndrome. It’s easy to get carried away with yourself that first year or two you’re famous. I forgive people for that. You get over it and then you go on to save the rainforest or whatever. That’s the way of Hollywood.
THIS REPORTER ON THE OTHER HAND… clearly had a problem with Miles from the get-go. She set out to write a hatchet-piece and succeeded. Even the photos they chose to run with the piece were pretty shitty. Look at that first picture below. It’s like the 67-year-old lovechild of David Duchovney and a potato.
Whether it was his fault or the reporter’s, I have a feeling Miles’ PR team is doing double duty right now trying to deal with this. They’ve probably tied him to a chair and propped his eyeballs open, Clockwork Orange-style, making him watch interviews with Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Tom Cruise, and Hugh Grant, so he can learn how to charm the masses and ingratiate himself with reporters.
Read the whole interview here and decide for yourself who comes off worse: Miles or Anna Peele, the reporter from Esquire with the chip on her shoulder?
The post OK, Who’s a Bigger Jerk? Miles Teller or the Esquire Reporter Who Wrote the Cover Story About Him? appeared first on World of Wonder.
