Recommendations of the Editorial team
In 2015, Esquire published a profile of Miles Teller that opened with the journalist interviewing the actor to “find out if he’s an ass.” More than a decade later, that still bothers Teller. The article, he recently told “IndieWire” at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, made him consciously avoid written portraits.
“It was so poorly handled,” Teller told IndieWire in Cannes. “The reason I stopped doing portraits is this: I figured if this interview wasn’t on camera, the person might misquote things, take things out of context, or claim things that never happened. That felt like a real violation of what actually took place.”
Back in 2015, Teller responded to the article by saying, “I don’t think it’s cool or entertaining to be an asshole or a complete idiot.” At Cannes, he said there was a clear gap between his self-image and what he read on the page. “I told my team, ‘Guys, I don’t think I’m going to do this again because I’m reading this and it doesn’t sound like me,'” he explained. “That’s not reality – so why would I ever want to be part of something where they can just write something like that in?”
Clicks instead of character
Teller attributed the framing of the story to the magazine’s hunger for clicks. “It’s unfortunate that being a decent human being doesn’t bring anything. People want to click on negativity,” he said. “When you lay your head on the pillow in the evening and know how you really treat people – that’s the only thing that counts. This interview from 2015 was twelve years ago now.” However, he doesn’t feel completely persecuted by it. “You can’t hide who you are on a set,” he said, pointing out that directors, producers, actors and crew know his true character.
In the years following the publication of the Esquire profile, Teller did not avoid the press entirely. Last year he gave a number of interviews in support of A24’s Eternity, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Callum Turner. Now he’s on a promotional tour for Paper Tiger, the James Gray film in which he stars alongside Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson.
