This story originally appeared in the September issue of Esquire. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. 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.
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 a. He recounts a direct message he—a twenty-eight-year-old actor still trying to find his place in his profession—sent to five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant through Twitter: Kobe, watched your Showtime documentary.
Really related to what you're talking about and striving for greatness and how it can oftentimes be an isolated journey, and how relationships can be a weakness in a way, if you're really kind of going after it. He says he wants to contribute to the body of great acting in the world, to the. Whatever, you know what he means. He thinks he has something to offer.
So yeah, he is kind of a dick. But the thing is, you agree with him: His admittedly limited body of work so far, his oeuvre —a word you define and spell for him, so who's the dick now? His first role, in 's Rabbit Hole , was as a tremulous teenager who runs over and kills the son of a couple played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart.
Now he's in the action game, with the Divergent series and this summer's Fantastic Four. Not all of them were winners, but they allowed him to show his thing, his Tellerian essence, by talking faster and drinking more and seeming to give fewer shits and inhaling more of the oxygen in the room than anyone else.
