In spite of its graphic and powerful fight scenes, calling “Bleed for This” a boxing movie wouldn’t do the film justice. And it’s more than a compelling story line, according to Miles Teller, who plays Vinny Pazienza, the champion boxer who fought back from a devastating spinal cord injury in the 1990s.
“This comeback is the greatest comeback in sports history, and it’s real,” Teller said. “It’s not some phony, fictionalized based-on-a-true-story. This is real. This happened. And I just think that’s so inspiring for anyone. It transcends boxing.”
Not only is “Bleed for This” true to Pazienza’s incredible battle, it’s also true to life for Teller. In 2007, when he was 20 years old, Teller was thrown from a car going 80 miles per hour. The near-fatal accident left his face and neck scarred and required years of recovery. Bizarrely, Teller has been in multiple movies that involve car accidents (“Rabbit Hole,” “The Spectacular Now,” “Whiplash”), but the collision in “Bleed for This” is perhaps closest to his own personal experience.
“When the car accident happens, it was similar for me as it was for Vinny in the sense that you don’t see it coming and you’re not really even sure of the repercussions and consequences until a while later,” the 29-year-old actor said. “It’s really traumatic for the people around you. I know my parents, when they saw that car accident, that was tougher for them to watch than the boxing because there’s a real truth there. Where I could relate to it more was picking up the pieces.”
Picking up the pieces consumes most of the movie—although “Bleed for This” begins and ends with boxing, the meat of the film focuses on Vinny’s recovery and struggle in the face of losing his identity. For Teller, who was told in the wake of his own accident that it didn’t make sense for the characters he auditioned for to have scars like his, Pazienza’s fear was easy to relate to.
“You think, ‘Oh man, is this job or this life that I’ve always envisioned for myself, has it been taken from me because of this car accident, this freak set of circumstances that you can’t control?'” he said. “But I always think in those moments, people learn a lot about themselves. I know Vinny had that, and I had it on a less severe level. But I think we both shared that in some way.”
Pazienza and Teller have plenty in common. Aside from their accidents, both grew up in the Northeast, consider themselves ordinary men of the people and take pride in what they do. Teller admitted there were certain things about Pazienza that he found crazy (a particularly gruesome scene in which Vinny insists doctors remove screws from his skull without pain medication comes to mind), but even those qualities struck Teller as praiseworthy.
“Vinny has been a badass since he was 6 years old. It wasn’t about being a badass, it was just about the depth of spirit and tenacity and will,” Teller said. “Physically, the pain tolerance has got to be through the roof. Your will being tested and how much do you want it? That’s the thing—everything is telling you to just quit and stop, and [he] still [goes] forward. I really admire that.”
Teller can speak to that pain tolerance a little bit because he did all of his own boxing in the film, taking blow after blow from opponents who were played by real boxers. He said the sport is hard. The glory is in the fight, but the sport itself is what goes into it: the constant training, the weight monitoring, the sacrifice. The fight is a sprint compared with the marathon of training.
A career in Hollywood is a different sort of fight, but one that also requires endurance. Of all the things he could focus on, Teller sees cultivating a diverse résumé as the most important task.
“Actors, if they’re lucky, they get to carve out their own career that’s specifically unique for them,” Teller said. “They’re figuring it out as they go, man. One minute you’re the hottest thing and you’re on top of the world, and the next you’ve got to reinvent. When you look at these actors that are able to do it for 20, 30, 40 years, now that I’ve only been doing it for seven years, I just have such respect for that. … It’s hard to do.”
His body of work is true to his words. In seven years, Teller has been in action flicks and prestige pictures, indies and franchises, bro movies and romantic comedies. He’s doing his best not to get pigeonholed, despite a stretch playing mostly lovable jerks and an Esquire profile that pegged him “a dick.” “Bleed for This” is part of that effort.
“You’re not going to be at the top of everyone’s list for every movie. Even if you think you can do something, a lot of people still have to sign off on you,” Teller said. “For this movie, that was [director] Ben [Younger]. Ben saw me in ‘Spectacular Now’ and knew I could play this part. And I don’t know many people who would be able to watch ‘Spectacular Now’ and have the foresight to see that kid as Vinny Paz. I can think I can do it all day, but unless a director is telling the financier that I’m their guy, it’s not going to matter.”
It’s hard to find a thread between “The Spectacular Now” and “Bleed for This” besides Teller himself, but perhaps what Younger saw was the fight. The fight it takes to come back from a car crash, the fight it takes to book roles as a kid with scars on his face, the fight it takes to rise above the fray of young Hollywood and make some noise. As Teller said, “Bleed for This” is about more than boxing.
@lchval | laurenchval@redeyechicago.com
