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Miles Teller Walks Back Those 'Divergent' Made Him Feel 'Dead Inside' Comments

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 25, 2014 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 25, 2014 |


Miles Teller is terrific. He makes a lot of terrible movie choices, but when you’re young and trying to grab a career by its horns, sometimes you grab the pointy part and get stab wounds in your palms. Bygones. But at least Teller has managed throughout his career to be the best part of a lot of bad movies and his latest, Two Night Stand (out on VOD tomorrow) looks like it will continue that streak. However, later this year, he has Whiplash, which will help — along with his previous role in Spectacular Now — to establish him as a legit actor before he takes on the role of Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four reboot.

Anyway, while out promoting Whiplash, Teller went and planted his foot deep into his esophagus by being honest in an interview with W Magazine, and as everyone knows, THERE’S NO PLACE FOR HONESTY IN HOLLYWOOD.

Here’s Teller, via Indiewire:

“When I first read ‘Whiplash,’ I was feeling dead inside,” the actor told W Magazine. “I didn’t have an interesting part [in ‘Divergent’], and I’d taken the film for business reasons: It was the first movie I’d done that was going to have an international audience. I called my agent and said, ‘this sucks.’ He told me about ‘Whiplash.’ ”

Well see, that statement is a problem because it not only shows that Teller is willing to badmouth a project he’s worked on, but Teller IS STILL WORKING ON IT. Teller is set for the sequel to Divergent out next year.

Naturally, it wasn’t long after this interview came to light that Teller took to Twitter, probably at the behest of his “people” and tweeted this:

Usually, actors try and qualify their statements or suggest that they were taken out of context. Not Teller! He just says the opposite of what he just said.

A day and a few more conversations with his agent later, and he’s decided he better go ahead and qualify the statement. Here’s the, “Ooops. They were taken out of context” walk-back, from the LA Times:

He said his remarks were in response to a question about why he had taken “such a small part [in ‘Divergent’] after playing the lead in several films.”

When he spoke of the “business,” he said he was referring to things like working with costar Shailene Woodley, playing a villain, and participating in a movie that would translate internationally. “Those were the ‘business reasons’ which every actor weighs; it’s not just the size of the part.

“And if I said ‘dead inside,’” he added, “I meant just burnt out and fatigued from doing my first big-budget lengthy shoot and four months was a long time and I just wanted to relax afterwards.”

OK, two things: 1) He forgot to clarify the part about telling his agent that doing Divergent “sucks”, and 2) does he mean to suggest that he took the Footloose remake for something other than “business reasons,” because, dude, do not tell me it was because you were really looking forward to the challenge of dancing in overalls.

Regardless of what Teller has to say about the experience of making Divergent, as someone who sat through the movie, the experience of watching it certainly made me feel “dead inside.”