Is Miles Teller A Hero Or A Heel? Looking At The Would-Be Star’s Career Moves

Miles Teller could be one of the greatest actors of his generation. A few years ago, he had broken through with a series of breathtaking turns in films like The Spectacular Now and Whiplash. He was in demand and on the rise.

However, Teller’s career is a bit adrift at the moment. If you look at his resume, you’ll notice that he hasn’t exactly had a hit in a while. The Divergent film series has fizzled out, Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot was an absolute disaster, and Get a Job went straight to VOD. Teller’s new film, a splashy boxer biopic, Bleed for This, bombed this weekend at the box office. So what can Teller do to reboot? I’d suggest that he should take a step back from jockeying for traditional leading man status and lean into his natural tendency to play the heel.

When Teller’s star was on the rise in 2014, he was dazzling critics in roles where he played — and forgive me for the coarseness of this expression — entitled little shits. The Spectacular Now cast Teller as a troubled teen wrestling with his heart and his ego. In Whiplash, we watch Teller’s character become so consumed with ambition that he puts his dreams of being a jazz drummer ahead of all human relationships. To become a great musician, his character must become the worst possible version of himself in all other areas. What made Teller so watchable in both roles was how he balanced arrogance with vulnerability. Just as he was twisting the knife in people, he was subtly revealing through minute measures his character’s inner pain to the audience. Essentially, we like Teller best when he shows us dicks can be human, too.

Hollywood has wrongly been trying to push Teller into a traditional leading man roles. It’s not that Teller doesn’t have the range to pull off a sweet, stretchy nerdy superhero or that he can’t play up the charm and woo Anna Kendrick. The problem is he’s just okay in these types of roles and he’s brilliant as a dipshit. His natural aura of arrogance has even slipped into his public persona. Last year, Esquire published a devastating profile (that Teller objected to) which highlighted his dickishness. Instead of refuting the piece or trying to reform his image, he should have leaned hard into it. He should be quit trying to be the hero and have fun being the heel.

Of course, this presents an inherent problem for Teller. See, it’s more glamorous to ambitious young actors to try to be the traditional leading man, the romantic hero, the charming underdog. These are the popular characters, the young men other young men want to be and whom young women want to get with. It’s natural that Teller would want to show that he’s just as capable of playing a boxer as Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Wahlberg, or Michael B. Jordan. But I think that if Teller really wanted to shine in a boxing movie, he should have called up his two-time co-star Michael B. Jordan to see if there was a way he could be the villain in Creed 2. Jordan v. Teller in the ring and on screen? That’s an electric combination that would allow both actors to show off their best attributes.

If Teller starts to embrace his natural prickliness, he’ll likely find that he’ll start getting noticed more favorably in reviews. He’s the kind of actor who can do a lot with a little. He’s good at dominating scenes and crushing other actors in his path. By going bad, Teller will just make himself look better. And if he starts to corner the market on these types of characters, he’ll discover that there will be more “anti-hero” lead roles available to him down the line. The young leading male character tends to be idealistic and unbroken; the older one is usually the one reckoning with his own failures.

Miles Teller’s career is hardly in the skids, but until he takes a really long look at what gave him that shock of heat in the first place, he’s going to keep trying to be a square peg in a round hole. He should stop trying to be a stereotypical hero and he should just be Miles Teller, total heel.

Where to Stream Miles Teller’s Best Work:

[Where to Stream The Spectacular Now]
[Where to Stream Whiplash]