Miles Teller on getting cut from Damien Chazelle's La La Land: 'What the f---, bro?'

By Jessica Derschowitz August 05, 2015 at 12:00 PM EDT

Credit: Esquire

If you read Miles Teller’s profile in the September issue of Esquire, you’ll learn a few interesting things about the actor. He refers to Joaquin Phoenix as “Joaq” during the interview, has a beer-inspired tattoo, and compares a highball glass to a part of his anatomy we won’t reprint here. But among those highlights is another about the undoing of Teller’s planned reteaming with his Whiplash director, Damien Chazelle.

Teller tells the magazine Chazelle offered him the lead role in his musical La La Land while the two were filming Whiplash, before the indie drama became an Oscar-winning hit. But then things changed, as Esquire’s Anna Peele writes:

Teller gets a little nervous telling the story, tearing his dinner roll to shreds and claiming he doesn’t know what happened before deciding, whatever, “These are just facts.” He explains that he almost passed up the chance to be in Arms and the Dudes because it would have conflicted with La La Land. “And I got a call from my agent, saying, ‘Hey, I just got a call from Lionsgate. Damien told them that he no longer thinks you’re creatively right for the project. He’s moving on without you.'”

Peele adds that Teller sent Chazelle a text (“What the f—, bro?”), but isn’t letting it get him down: “[Teller is] going to produce his own movies, movies he’s not going to get kicked out of, movies like the bank-robbery ensemble piece The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang and a family drama, Home Is Burning.”

Chazelle, for his part, told EW back in February of this year that Teller would star in La La Land.

“It’s set in contemporary [Los Angeles], but it’s very much an homage to Technicolor, Cinemascope, ’50s musicals — A Star is Born, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It’s Always Fair Weather, movies like that,” he said, adding, “Miles is the lead. And we’re still casting the rest. Nothing else is certain.”

That film, which stars Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and Whiplash’s J.K. Simmons, is due to arrive in theaters next July. Representatives for Chazelle did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about Teller’s Esquire remarks.

Peele’s article delivers on the promise of the sub-headline, which reads, “Our latest cover star is on a quest for greatness. Sometimes than can involve a bit of d-ckishness too.” Teller responded on Twitter:

You can read more from Teller’s Esquire interview at the magazine’s website.