Miles Teller discusses his exit from La La Land

Miles Teller is in town to promote his new boxing movie, Bleed For This, which is earning a gala screening (sponsored by Empire, no less) at the London Film Festival. But he could have easily been in town to promote La La Land, the new musical from his Whiplash director Damien Chazelle, which the actor was previously attached to.

Speaking to the Empire Podcast, Teller said that he had no regrets about dropping out of the project. “I think both La La Land and Bleed For This are having nice moments right now,” he told us. “I don't have any regrets about it.”

Many rumours surfaced about why he left the role that eventually went to Ryan Gosling, and Teller was reticent to go into too much detail on the reasons behind his exit. “I don't like to talk about it too much because there's a lot of things that happen before a movie gets made...and I just feel like those are personal kind of things.” But he was keen to clarify a story from The Hollywood Reporter{ =nofollow}, which claimed that Teller was holding out for more money and “balked” at a $4 million payday.

“The whole 'me turning down the movie after I was offered $4 million dollars' is complete bullshit,” Teller said. “These publications print things so people read their article and then they say an 'unnamed source said this'. All that's bullshit.”

[In a 2015 interview with Esquire](http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a36894/miles-teller-interview-0915/

), Teller described how one day he got a call from his agent saying, “Hey, I just got a call from Lionsgate. Damien [Chazelle] told them that he no longer thinks you're creatively right for the project. He's moving on without you.” Teller reportedly sent his director a text: “What the fuck, bro?”

But today, Teller suggested there was no bad blood between Chazelle and himself. “I'm happy for them,” he insisted. “You just want to be part of quality movies and we have that with Bleed For This and they have that with La La Land.

Bleed For This bows at the LFF on Sunday 9 October, before a wide release on December 2. Be sure to subscribe to the Empire Podcast to listen to the full interview with Miles Teller in a future episode.