Who Does Miles Teller Play in the Michael Jackson Movie?

Michael Jackson’s music was played constantly in my house when I was growing up. My parents loved him, as did my brothers and I. It certainly helped that, in addition to making the Thriller music video, he had appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, something that James L. Brooks and Matt Groening eventually realized may have been done for more insidious reasons. And, to be fair, it worked like a charm on us three impressionable young boys. However, that hold would not last.

I can’t say what exactly made things change in my mind. While I wasn’t old enough to really know what happened with the 1993 accusations against the singer, I remember tuning in for reenactments of the 2005 trial, because Jimmy Kimmel was playing Jay Leno in them, and that was exciting to 13-year-old Andrew, I guess. Memories mix together, but I also feel like that was around the time MJ dangled his child over a balcony, something I wanted to recreate as a political cartoon using the Lion King’s Pride Rock scene as a reference (but I couldn’t draw).

All that to say, while I was interested in seeing an aspect of Michael Jackson’s life reproduced twenty years ago, I am not interested now. A trailer just released for Michael, a film about the pop star’s early days and rise to stardom. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua and has incredible actors like Nia Long and Colman Domingo (the latter of whom is clearly going for their overbearing father Oscar). But one actor who has stood out to people is Miles Teller. Not only because he is a big ole star, but because of who he is playing.

Long and Domingo will be playing Jackson’s parents. So, it makes sense to cast two phenomenal actors. Teller is playing… John Branca. You know! John Branca! Entertainment lawyer extraordinaire (I assume he says)? Branca took over Jackson’s career when the star fired his father. According to Branca, he was instrumental in turning Jackson into the star we know him as. He is also an executor of Jackson’s estate and a producer on the film, something Michael’s daughter Paris has had a lot of issues with.

Paris has accused Branca of improprieties, some of which are related to the film. In addition to claiming that the script for the movie is “sugar-coated,” she questioned why money needed to be spent to hire Teller, a movie star, to play Branca, a man most people don’t know. She has also accused Branca of mismanaging funds for the estate and inflating his importance to Jackson’s career beyond what really happened. None of this is helped by the film finding itself in some early legal trouble.

Originally, the movie actually tackled accusations that were levied against Jackson in 1993. However, they would come to realize that they could not portray one of the accusers, Jordan Chandler, on screen. So, the film went on to make extensive reshoots and may be split into two parts. We may never know what the film was originally going to say, but I can take a shot in the dark and say that if someone in charge of Michael’s estate, who paid for a sanitized script, is a producer on the film, hired an A-list actor to play him, and wants to continue making money off Jackson’s memory as long as he can, then “sugar-coated” may have been… too kind.