How Miles Teller Fought Past Car Accident Scars That Nearly Derailed His Career
Miles Teller has talked many times about how lucky he feels to be alive. In interviews, including one with ABC News, he explained that everything changed when he was 20. He was riding in a car with a friend when the friend lost control.
The car flipped eight times. Teller was thrown out of the window and later found lying about 50 feet away, unconscious and covered in blood. He has said that his friend thought he was dead.
That violent accident left him with scars on his face and neck, and those scars followed him into the early years of his acting career.
Teller told ABC News, “My buddy lost control of my car going 80 mph. We flipped eight times. I got ejected out the window… I was just laying like 50 feet from the car, unconscious, covered in blood.”
He added that he still has scars and even “two rocks in my face.” Doctors told him that removing the rocks would only make the scarring worse. For years after the crash, he went through painful laser treatments to try to reduce the marks.
In the most recent interview with Collider, Teller admitted that the scars made auditions tough. He said, “If you look at some of my early work, the scars on my face were really bad.” Casting directors liked his acting, but many didn’t think the characters they were casting should have scars. According to Teller, they would often say things like, “Miles is a really good actor, but it doesn’t make sense for this character to have scars.”
Things finally changed when director John Cameron Mitchell cast him in the 2010 movie “Rabbit Hole.” Teller said Mitchell didn’t see the scars as a problem at all. Instead, he embraced them. Teller remembered Mitchell telling him, “I love your scars. It’s a mystery, and we don’t have to explain it.” This role became Teller’s film debut and gave him the break he needed.
Looking back, Teller has said that going through something so intense at a young age shaped the kind of roles he chased. He started looking for characters with emotional weight or deeper struggles. Before long, those parts started coming his way, including his breakout performance in “Whiplash” in 2014. The film, directed by Damien Chazelle, followed a young drummer pushed to the edge by his brutal instructor, played by J.K. Simmons.
Teller has always been open about how close he came to not surviving that crash. While he jokes about being put straight into an ambulance rather than “walking away,” he knows how fortunate he was. As he put it, “I just feel really fortunate to have walked away… fairly unscathed, as far as anything being permanently debilitating.” Despite the struggle his scars caused early in his career, they became part of his story and, eventually, part of what made him stand out.
Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!