Miles Teller on Likability

Miles Teller sat down for an interview with Vulture ahead of the release of his new film Thank You For Your Service. Here are some highlights from that interview:

On Esquire labeling him "kind of a dick":
“There’s nothing I can control about how people see me as a person, but I can control how they think of me as an actor. This is the part of my career where I wanna start stringing together great roles. People outside of the business will think of me however they want, but I want people inside the business to see everything I can do. I gotta get moving.”

I have to say, and I know this is something you’re probably not jazzed to discuss, but when I mentioned to a couple friends that I’d be talking to you, the first thing they brought up was your Esquire profile. Without getting into the circumstances of that piece, how much does your offscreen likability affect the reception to your onscreen work? Or put another way, does it matter if people like you?
"Look, I don’t have Instagram and I’m not blowing up Twitter and I’ve still gotten cast in a bunch of great projects. I absolutely know actors that have been cast in things because they have a big social-media following but I don’t know — certain people expect that if you’re an actor in your 20s that you should be glad-hand-y and smiley and all that shit. 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. So, do I think of acting as a popularity contest? No. Was it tough for me when that Esquire article came out? It was."

Tough on your life or your career?
"If how that story made me look was how I really was, I’d think I was the biggest douchebag too. The main idea in that story was that Miles Teller doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think of him. That’s really not true. I absolutely do care what people think about me. But I can’t put much weight into whether the public likes me because the more important thing is that, as an actor, I can truly say that there’s not a single director or actor who I’ve worked with who’d have a bad thing to say about me. I’ve never missed a day of work. I’ve never not known a line. So I feel good about where I am."

I’m sure I’m far more neurotic than you are, but if I knew that someone I’d met thought I was a jerk — after an interaction that seemed fine to me — then I’d probably obsess over what I’d missed or what had gone wrong. Did the Esquire story cause any of that kind of introspection on your part?

"If you really let that kind of thing get to you, man, it’ll get stuck in your head. And when I put my head to my pillow at night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I honestly felt like I was behaving like an asshole to people. I know the kind of brother I am. I know the kind of son I am. I’ve had the same friends since I was 14, 15. I’ve been with the same girl for four-and-a-half years.Teller proposed to his longtime girlfriend, model Keleigh Sperry, last August, while the two were on safari vacation in Africa.  I have a dog. I know who I am, and it’s not who I was in that story."

Read the full interview at Vulture.