“We’re in trouble”: The movie Miles Teller knew was doomed from the start
Miles Teller is the rare actor who would seemingly be perfect for any standard leading man roles that Hollywood could offer him, but has instead taken an interest in doing things that are a bit more ambitious and weird.
While he certainly has an innate ability to be charming, inspired by his love of Saturday Night Live legends, Teller has consistently done his best work when he’s working on smaller-scale, character-centric projects.
Teller’s initial series of breakout roles is indicative of how he can use empathy to his advantage, which had him playing a teenager responsible for a fatal car crash in Rabbit Hole, a reckless high school slacker in The Spectacular Now, and an obsessive, volatile aspiring musician in Whiplash, showing that he could take unconventional roles and make them oddly compelling, but it also meant that he wouldn’t have the same opportunity to succeed when tasked with playing a less complex character.
There aren’t many actors of his generation who haven’t appeared in at least one comic book project, as it’s become an all-consuming genre that has dominated popular culture, and so he was seemingly given the opportunity of a lifetime when he was cast to play Reed Richards, the brilliant scientist who becomes Mr Fantastic, in the reboot of Fantastic Four from 20th Century Fox that was directed by Josh Trank.
The story of what happened on the set of Fantastic Four has now become somewhat of a Hollywood ghost tale. It was due to Trank’s erratic behaviour and major intervention on the studio’s part that Fantastic Four subjected its cast and crew to misery, and things only got worse when it was released. While the film was intended to kickstart a new franchise for Fox, one that could run concurrently to its X-Men series, it turned off casual moviegoers and infuriated comic book fans.
Teller has been nothing but honest about his experiences on the film set and said that he began to know that things were going to end poorly very quickly.
“When I first saw the movie, I remember talking to one of the studio heads and said, ‘I think we’re in trouble’,” he told Variety.
The man has been diplomatic enough not to throw anyone under the bus, even if he’s strongly implied that it was Trank’s behaviour that caused the production to be so chaotic. In his defence, it’s hard to say that Teller was bad in Fantastic Four because the script was so bad that it’s hard to imagine that even Daniel Day-Lewis could have saved it. The primary issue was the film’s decision to cast someone of Teller’s age to play a character who is described in the comics to be a brilliant scientist, which is why Pedro Pascal was a better choice to play the part in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
The failure of Fantastic Four didn’t end up harming Teller’s career, as he’s been able to star in a multitude of interesting projects that show his range, including the neo-noir crime series Too Old To Die Young and the boxing drama Bleed for This. That being said, he also got the last laugh when it came to blockbusters, being one of the stars of Top Gun: Maverick, which grossed more than any of the Marvel films ever made by Fox.
