Miles Teller Was Paid Only $8,000 For A Movie That Ended Up Winning 3 Oscars
The difference in salaries between big stars and up-and-coming talented actors, who have yet to be noticed by the audience can be staggering.
Case in point: the current top-earning actor, Tom Cruise gets almost as much for a single word of dialogue, as his co-star in Top Gun: Maverick, Miles Teller, got for his entire role in the movie that ended up winning 3 Oscars and served as his breakthrough, if not exactly into the A-list of Hollywood actors, then into the ranks of recognized new talents.
We're talking about Whiplash (2014), an independent psychological drama film, which became a sudden hit, with the box office almost sixteen times the size of its modest $3.3 million budget, and brought recognition to its director, Damien Chazelle, as well as to its main cast.
Miles Teller played the lead role in that film. His performance was not the most notable of the cast; that honor goes to J.K. Simmons, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Terence Fletcher. But Teller's performance was still indispensable for the film's success, because the tumultuous interactions between his character, Andrew Neiman, an aspiring musician, and Fletcher, a harsh and manipulative conductor of their conservatory's band, were the core of the plot.
And Teller played his role well enough to be nominated for three MTV Movie Awards, and four other awards for Whiplash. Even though he ultimately won none of them, his performance was clearly recognized as praiseworthy.
However, for that performance Miles Teller got only $8,000 after the taxes, even though by that point he already played lead roles in a couple of similarly low-budget movies, as he revealed in an interview with the Times.
Well, at least after playing Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, the most important supporting character in above-mentioned Top Gun: Maverick, Teller's career seems to be on the rise, so now he can forget about working for peanuts.
While for now he is not starring in any big upcoming projects, his career is almost certainly going to reach new heights with the boost in popularity and support he got from Top Gun. In fact, now there are talks of a possible Top Gun sequel centered around his character.