Miles Teller has opened up a bit about one of the more distressing moments of his entire career: The way his efforts, post-Whiplash, to fully embrace the Hollywood leading man stereotype (i.e., by getting himself his own superhero franchise) collided full-on with the disaster surrounding 2015’s Fantastic Four. Specifically (per Variety), Teller talked to Andy Cohen on Sirius XM this week about the flop, saying that, “Honestly, maybe there was one really important person who kind of fucked it all up.”
Teller declined to name names for this particular RIP(WKOFIAU), although internet detectives have not had to look super hard to find a likely subject for the Eternity star’s comments. Fantastic Four was, after all, dogged for months by rumors of conflict between director Josh Trank and pretty much everybody else on set—including Teller, who supposedly nearly got into a full-on fist fight with his director over clashing personalities. Everybody tried to make nice in public as the film’s August 2015 premiere approached, with Trank notably doing damage control with producer and writer Simon Kinberg, hoping to dispel rumors he’d been fired from his own movie in all but name.
But then, on the literal night before the movie came out, Trank sent out a since-deleted Tweet bemoaning that audiences would “probably never get to see” the “fantastic version of this” he’d had “a year ago.” (The implication being that studio meddling, reshoots, and seized control of the movie’s final edit had already ruined the film.) The rest was history: A critical drubbing, a box office return that just barely cleared the movie’s budget, and Trank’s vanishing from the list of up-and-coming genre filmmakers he’d been slotted onto in the wake of his 2012 found-footage superhero movie Chronicle. (He probably would have lost the Star Wars movie he’d been working on at that point, too, except he’d already lost it four months earlier; Disney was reportedly unhappy when it heard about how he’d been comporting himself on his first big-budget film set.)
And, again, Teller himself was classy enough not to get into any of this well-known superhero movie lore, beyond pointing out the singular nature of the culprit for his movie’s famed fucking up. (He does note that “When I first saw the movie, I remember talking to one of the studio heads and said, ‘I think we’re in trouble,'” which suggests that he was not as enamored with Trank’s initial, reportedly much more somber, cut of the film than the director himself was.) The actor mostly just sounds kind of wistful at the missed opportunity, saying of his co-stars (which included Kate Mara, Toby Kebbell, Jamie Bell and Michael B. Jordan) that “The casting, I thought, was spectacular. I love all those actors… It’s unfortunate…because so many people worked so hard on that movie.”
