Miles Teller Doesn't Appreciate Being Pegged As A Frat Boy

The real Miles Teller would like to come to the phone right now, and he has a message for everyone.

"I think if people want to make me out to be some fratty guy, then so be it," he says in a new, lengthy interview with Vulture. Teller is keenly aware that people think he's the type to pop his collar and drink beer directly out of the keg with a garden hose. But Teller pushes back firmly against this caricature, explaining that "there’s nothing I can control about how people see me as a person." Vulture notes that he was spitting chewing tobacco into a cup as as he spoke.

Teller also discussed his love of the Grateful Dead. "The great thing about the Dead, right, is that you can literally hear the same song 100 different ways depending on the year and what drugs the band was on," Teller says, before admitting that he doesn't enjoy their music while he's sober. "When I’m at a concert I’m looking to escape," he says. Teller then bemoans that "this narrative — that I like to party — keeps following me around." Okay then. It's easy to wonder if he's purposefully or unknowingly egging on that narrative.

The perception that Teller is, well, a bro, is rooted in an 2015 interview with Esquire. In the interview, he talks a lot about his "nice" hair and talks about his penis to a server. The journalist, Anna Peele, calls him "kind of a dick." Teller addresses this in the new Vulture interview, admitting that "if [the Esquire] story made me look was how I really was, I’d think I was the biggest douchebag too. The main idea in that story was that Miles Teller doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think of him. That’s really not true. I absolutely do care what people think about me."

If Teller's goal was in this interview was so prove that he isn't a "frat" type, well, we agree that maybe he didn't come quite as charming as he hoped. That said, does he need to be charming? Is it his job to make us like him? If he's still being cast in movies, he's succeeding at work, and that seems to be his primary concern. As long as he likes himself, we think that's the important thing. "When you’re in a drama class in front of 14 people and you have to push an imaginary box across a room for 30 minutes while everyone’s watching," he says, "you better be okay with who you are."