“I’ve never really been the starving artist,” says Miles Teller. That’s putting things mildly – the 28-year-old actor from Pennsylvania is the very definition of young Hollywood success.
In the past 12 months alone, he has wowed audiences as a driven jazz drummer in the Oscar-winning indie smash Whiplash and co-starred in hit young-adult thriller Insurgent.
Smart, eloquent and hugely ambitious, Teller has had it this way since he graduated from college and immediately landed his feature film debut role – opposite Nicole Kidman in 2010s grief-drama Rabbit Hole.
That’s why he laughs when he tells me his parents were always supportive of his career – “maybe because I never had to ask them for money”.
Now Teller is taking the lead role in Fantastic Four, based on the comic-book series created in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, about four youngsters given freakish powers after a scientific experiment goes wrong.
It’s the latest Marvel comic-strip adaptation to hit the screens and an attempt to reboot the franchise after two poorly received films in 2005 and 2007.
“It’s nice to play something my little cousins can see,” he says.
Whether they will bother is another matter, with the film beset by problems and exceptionally bad reviews.
Co-writer and director Josh Trank’s on-set behaviour was reportedly “erratic”, with rumours of re-shoots and in-fighting dogging the production. It didn’t help when Teller’s co-star Kate Mara, who plays “Invisible Woman” Sue Storm, spoke out that the film wasn’t based on any of the original comics.
For his part, Teller has kept diplomatic counsel over the controversies. Cast as Reed Richards – aka Mr Fantastic, who gets cursed with rubber-like limbs during the botched experiment – he took “a very realistic approach” to the story.
“I never went on set thinking, ‘I’m Mr Fantastic – the stretchy guy.’ I went thinking: ‘I’m Reed Richards and I’m trying to talk to this girl’, or ‘I’m Reed Richards, how do I tap into that extreme depth of intelligence?’
“So I saw Reed Richards as a very competent character, and I think the other guys did the same thing.”
With the cast also including British actor Jamie Bell (as Ben Grimm, aka “The Thing”) and Michael B Jordan (as Johnny Storm, the “Human Torch”), Teller saw the film as a very useful way of boosting his profile.
“In order to do the small movies, you have to do the big ones,” he says. “A lot of the small movies here [in America], they don’t travel, they don’t go overseas. So to play in a movie that will open in Russia and open all over Europe and in China, that’s big.
“Acting doesn’t just live and die in America.”
Similarly, Teller doesn't just want to be seen as the wisecracking youngster – a role he's played in films including That Awkward Moment and The Spectacular Now. Since completing Fantastic Four, he has deliberately sought out more mature roles – not least as real-life boxer Vinny Pazienza in the upcoming biopic Bleed For This.
“I was not on the list for movies where the character was kind of a badass,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to be able to do it all and by me being able to buff up physically, that opens up a whole new world to me that wasn’t available.”
Citing the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Jeff Bridges and Tom Hanks, “favourite actors” who have frequently switched between comedy and drama, Teller clearly wants to follow suit. “I want the meaty stuff,” he says. “When you’re the softer, funny guy, you’re not going to get that stuff.”
All too aware that Hollywood is not the most imaginative when it comes to casting, he recently signed on for the role of a weapons dealer in Arms And The Dudes, with Jonah Hill.
“It seems like I’m finally starting to get a lot of the parts that I’ve wanted,” he says.
Now, however history judges his contribution to Marvel’s big-screen output, he seems to be perfectly placed to show us why he’s a real-life Mr Fantastic.
• Fantastic Four opens in cinemas on Thursday
artslife@thenational.ae
