Miles Teller says he was perfect for ‘War Dogs’ because he used to be a stoner.
The 29-year-old actor stars with Jonah Hill, 32, in the new movie about two 20-something stoners who won a $300 million contract with the Pentagon to supply US allies with arms in Afghanistan and Miles says his father encouraged him to take the role because of his past.
He told Collider: "How I first got it was my dad sent me an email saying that he just saw that Todd [Phillips]’s company had gotten the rights for this article Arms and the Dudes. He said, ‘Here’s the article, I just read it, I think you’d be perfect for it. You gotta tell Todd to put you in the movie.’
"And I saw Todd at a restaurant like a couple of months after that and I said, ‘Hey man, what’s up with Arms and the Dudes? You gotta put me in it.’ I think my dad felt I’d be perfect for it because I used to be a pretty big stoner and it was just a cool, edgy article, and he knew that I’d been wanting to work with Todd for a long time. So I was very excited for it."
The movie is based on the Rolling Stone article, ‘The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders’ by by Guy Lawson, and Miles admits he is baffled by how the young men were able to pull it off.
He said: "To be able to work with those kind of numbers, even just to be able to put in and bid – I painted houses, my buddy had a painting company, so we used to put bids on houses and you’re dealing with such small numbers and it’s still a certain amount of craftsmanship that comes up with that.
"So when these guys were bidding on contracts for tanks and guns and these things and it’s just these two -well in real life it was three- guys, to be able to do that obviously for this movie we’re bumping up the entertainment factor a little bit, so these guys didn’t drive through the Triangle of Death, they didn’t do a lot of these things. But that to me and having that kind of awareness or business savvy attitudes at 23, at 23 I was the furthest thing from being able to walk into a room or have any kind of conversation with the Pentagon."
Miles Teller: ‘Stoner past made me perfect for War Dogs’
