Miles Teller has never been one to duck a challenge.
The actor, whose performance as a tormented virtuoso jazz drummer in the Oscar-winning Whiplash still ranks top of his résumé, has a history of picking roles that demand a physical and emotional commitment to a character. For the most part, these challenges – perfecting an instrument, getting into shape and so on – have come with the territory for serious leading men. Training to avoid gravity-induced loss of consciousness, on the other hand, has not.
Teller stars as Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw in Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to Tony Scott’s 1980s blockbuster – and suffice to say, learning to deliver lines at 1,000mph is not an experience he intends to forget in a hurry. Ahead of the movie’s global release on May 27, TechRadar spoke with the actor to talk jets, g-force and the pressures (and privilege) of working with Tom Cruise.
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“With Whiplash, I only had about, I think, two-and-a-half weeks of drum lessons, which was really condensed and intense,” Teller tells us in London, some three years after last taking to the skies of Nevada for Top Gun: Maverick. “On [boxing movie] Bleed for This, I lost probably 20 pounds and the training for that was also really intense. But with Top Gun, the difficulty really was just how long it all was – because we flew for about four months before we started filming.”
Teller is referring to the gruelling training regime imposed by ringmaster Cruise on all of the movie’s actors to prepare them for life at 30,000 feet. We could describe the program in detail here, but we’d sooner recommend watching the below video to really get a sense of the physical demands involved in the film’s production.
“And then [once we’d finished the training],” Teller continues, “we were flying almost every day, and it was a skill that we had to keep practising constantly. So, I mean, every type of movie preparation I’ve done has been unique – but this one was really tough.”
But Top Gun: Maverick didn’t only prove a physical challenge for Teller and company. As the movie’s director, Joseph Kosinski, explained in a separate interview with TechRadar, the F-18 fighter jets used throughout were fitted with six cockpit cameras, and the actors themselves were tasked with ensuring that footage captured in the air was up to scratch.
“Once we got up in the jet, the only person we could talk to was the pilot,” Teller explains, “and we would have to be perfectly in sync with them because if he, for example, moves the stick left and I’m a second behind [in my dialogue], now the plane is moving ahead of time and I'm a little delayed. So that doesn't look right.
Every type of movie preparation I’ve done has been unique – but this one was really tough.
Miles Teller
“But we were also camera operators who would start and stop the camera, which meant we’d have to be in charge of the continuity of it all – making sure that our eyelines matched with what had been filmed earlier, and that everything was cohesive from take to take.”
We ask Teller whether he enjoyed that autonomy as an actor: “No, dude!” he laughs. “I like when other people are doing their job and I only have to worry about acting.” We appreciate the honesty.
Family ties
Rooster is the son of Maverick’s late co-pilot, Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw (played by Anthony Edwards in Scott’s original movie), and his unexpected arrival at the present-day Top Gun flight school forces Cruise’s aging ace to reckon with the trauma of his past.
Beyond a (rather large) handful of callbacks – windswept motorcycle rides and shirtless beach scenes chief among them – this awkward association forms Top Gun: Maverick’s narrative linchpin and makes for its most meaningful connection to the 1986 classic. But did Teller find that his character’s relationship to Goose brought with it a weight of expectation?
It was about striking a healthy balance between paying homage and defining this character as his own.
Miles Teller
“Well, I think it's two-sided,” the actor explains, “because you understand what the audience is going to want and expect in certain moments. And I think when Rooster walks on screen, you want to be able to understand, from his look, that ‘Oh, that's got to be Goose’s kid!’”
Fans of the original won’t have any trouble joining the dots. Teller’s Rooster makes quite the entrance in Kosinski’s sequel, swaggering into the movie’s first bar scene bearing a near-identical moustache and Hawaiian shirt to his father, before hopping on the ivories to deliver a similarly rousing rendition of Great Balls of Fire.
“But that being said,” Teller continues, “my character’s dad passed away when he was really just a toddler, so if you have too much of a likeness to him, I think it wouldn't really make sense. It was about striking a healthy balance between paying homage and defining this character as his own.”
The best of the best
As for working with Tom Cruise, an actor – nay, the actor – often regarded as Hollywood’s last true movie star, Teller is keen to praise his role as a teacher as much as a co-star.
“Nobody had ever really done footage like this,” he explains, “so Tom was really training everybody and even himself. He was discovering how to get these shots when you're in one jet and you’re filming with another jet – how to really capture those sequences. I think Tom's favourite word is ‘dynamic’. We would do something and he would say ‘it's not dynamic enough!’ So then you’ve got to up the dynamism… the dynamite!”
Teller wasn’t the only one under Cruise’s stewardship. Relative newcomers Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez and Greg Tarzan Davis were among the other young actors enlisted in the star’s unconventional filmmaking bootcamp, and the entire ensemble manage to hold their own in scenes that could so easily have been dominated by the indomitable Hollywood charm of their tutor.
But while Top Gun: Maverick’s cast more than rose to the challenge of aerial acting, having to perform at consistently face-warping speeds didn’t come without the occasional need for “barf bags” inside the cockpit. Naturally, we ask Teller: of all the movie’s new recruits, who was the worst at handling the g-force?
“Oh, man. Well, we don’t like to talk about it,” he says, smiling. “That’s not being a very good wingman. But one of the guys… yeah, I mean he was puking almost every time, even on the very last day. So I'll leave it up to the audience to guess who that is.”
Our money’s on Glen Powell.
Top Gun: Maverick releases exclusively in theaters worldwide on May 27.
