A Fake Mustache Got Miles Teller Cast In Top Gun: Maverick
Miles Teller is a key part of Top Gun: Maverick, and he can thank director Joseph Kosinski's fake mustache for that.
Miles Teller plays the pivotal role of Goose’s son in Top Gun: Maverick, the long-delayed, ridiculously successful sequel to Tom Cruise’s 1986 hit, but apparently it took him a trick to get cast. According to Vulture, director Joseph Kosinski had Teller in mind for a role in the film after working with the actor in 2017’s Only the Brave. It seems that in order to pitch the former Mister Fantastic to Tom Cruise, Kosinski felt he had to bring the big guns out and show Cruise a picture of Miles Teller with dyed blonde hair and a photoshopped mustache. Needless to say, he got the role.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Miles Teller plays Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the grown son of Anthony Edwards’ Nick “Goose” Bradshaw from the original movie. A key plot point of the 1986 Top Gun involved the death of Goose during a training exercise that was ruled to not be Tom Cruise’s Maverick’s fault, though you can make the argument that it was definitely Val Kilmer’s Iceman’s fault. In the new movie, Miles Teller understandably has some harsh feelings for the man who commanded his father’s loyalty over that of his only child and ultimately was involved in his death. But regardless of who killed who, both Goose and Rooster have a genetic predilection for rocking a mean mustache. Check it out:
Prior to his role in Top Gun: Maverick, Miles Teller was most famous for his breakout role in 2014’s Whiplash. In Damien Chazelle’s psychological drama, Teller played a young jazz drummer at a prestigious musical conservatory pushed to both obsession and greatness by an abusive instructor (a career-best J.K. Simmons). Miles Teller was also originally slated to play the male lead in Chazelle’s follow-up film La La Land, but eventually dropped out and was replaced by Ryan Gosling. Since then, he has starred as Reed Richards in the 2015 mega-bomb Fantastic Four (a role he is willing to consider returning to if very specific conditions are met), in the young adult dystopian science fiction series Divergent with Shailene Woodley), and in the 2016 black comedy War Dogs with Jonah Hill.
Top Gun: Maverick involves Tom Cruise’s titular Naval aviator coming to terms with his career and eventually training a new cadre of emotionally volatile, ultra-competitive twenty-somethings tasked with operating supersonic weapons of mass destruction. It can be assumed that at some point Miles Teller and Tom Cruise butt heads, but then eventually learn to trust each other to be good wingmen.
But regardless of the chances of emotional reconciliation between Tom Cruise and Miles Teller’s characters, Top Gun: Maverick has been an enormous success by every metric. The movie is projected to quickly become Tom Cruise’s highest domestically performing film ever (beating out the Steven Spielberg-directed War of the Worlds) and is receiving universal critical acclaim. Miles Teller should thank that fake mustache for his involvement.
