Get used to seeing a lot of Miles Teller. The 26-year-old actor appears in five films set for release in 2013 -- including the well-received Sundance debut "The Spectacular Now" -- making him an early favorite to replicate the success of 2012 breakout star Rebel Wilson. Another point of interest: Teller is almost completely naked in the new film "21 and Over," save for a well-placed sock.
In the comedy from "The Hangover" writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, Teller plays Miller, a motormouth ne'er-do-well (think Vince Vaughn by way of Shia LaBeouf) who teams with his straight-laced friend (Skylar Astin) to celebrate the 21st birthday of their high school pal (Justin Chon). Things go as awry as they normally do in R-rated comedies about male friendship, leaving Miller to learn some valuable lessons about life and underwear.
Teller spoke to HuffPost Entertainment about the influences for "21 and Over," his own 21st birthday and why he wasn't worried about the sock.
With this and "Project X," you've got wild party movies on lock. Because of that, though, did you have any trepidation about doing a similar film so soon after?I didn't really give a shit about that. As far as being an actor goes, I know I have range, so I wasn't really too worried about it. Also, when I read the script, it was the funniest script I ever read. I was excited to do it. "Project X," it was more of a cameo. With this movie, I always wanted to do a rated-R comedy. When I was in high school, there was "Superbad" and "The Girl Next Door" and "Wedding Crashers" and all these great movies. You hope to be a part of something that's smart, funny and in that Todd Phillips-vein. You want to make something like "Superbad." That movie was so good and so funny. I just wanted to make something that would give people that experience.
You and Skylar have great chemistry in the film -- it really looks like you guys are having a blast and that's infectious. How important was it to keep that tone throughout?With Skylar, I think it was the fact that we both kind of came from theater. Comedy has a certain rhythm to it; he had done a musical comedy, which is more polished than film, but there's a certain rhythm to it and Skylar gets that. To be a straight man, you need to be able to set jokes up; at the same time, I need to be able to deliver them. I think we just both got the rhythm of the script. That's a credit to Jon and Scott's writing. Dude, when I read that script, I thought I had never read something that was so close to my own voice.
Was there a lot of collaboration between you and Jon and Scott?A lot of that movie is ad-libbed. In the beginning, that whole monologue that I do when I'm pacing the couch and saying, "This is your 21st birthday. If you were in Africa, you'd have to kill a bear." "But there are no bears in Africa." That was just pure ad-lib. I was like, "Dude, leave the camera on and let me run for 20 minutes. Jon and Scott, they realize how to get comedy. They let us use our strengths. I'm pretty good at ad-libbing and improv and Skylar is too. We'd do the first take on book ... ish. Then we'd loosen it up and then he'd give us a couple of takes to do whatever we wanted. We came up with this character thing that Miller just repeats Snapple facts. He kind of knows a little bit of everything, but a lot of the shit is just not true. Maybe he heard somebody say that in a grocery store and picked up on it and found it to be true. We just messed with it a lot.
You spend a good chunk of the film naked, except for a tube sock. How do prepare for that?I worked out for a while. I felt pretty good about what I was going to look like on camera. You're still there with a tube sock on with 40 crew guys around and the sock feels like it's going to fall off the whole time. It never feels that secure. Then you're having to do the lines and the scene and all these people around. The first one was a little nerve-wracking. After that, we would just stay in the sock in between takes. It was just freeing. There would be a nice breeze going, it felt good.
This film is about celebrating a 21st birthday. What did you do on your 21st birthday?My 21st birthday, six of my best friends from Florida flew up to New York. Six or seven -- I don't know, there was a shitton of them. They all stayed in my dorm. They all flew up there. One of them, it was his first time on a plane; it was the first time they had seen snow. I grew up in a very small town in Florida, like 7,000 people. My mom made these t-shirts with my face on them. They're bright green. We all wore those t-shirts and just walked around New York. Everyone was so excited because they had never been there. It was cool.
Do you still have that shirt?Dude, I still have my t-shirt. I told my buddies to wear theirs when they came out for the premiere. My one friend didn't wear because he's like, "There's no way I'm going to get pussy wearing a shirt with a picture of your face on it!" He ended up putting it on. It worked out; I think he ended up hooking up with a chick. People did not know what was going on. They thought we were in a band.
