Miles Teller Joins Director Ruben Fleischer's STOPWATCH GANG
Miles Teller made waves with his excellent work in the solid teen romance The Spectacular Now, and really got everyone's attention with his intense, devoted performance in last year's Whiplash. He'll be reuniting with Whiplash writer/director Damien Chazelle for another film called La La Land soon, and of course he'll be playing Reed Richards in Josh Trank's new version of Fantastic Four, but in the meantime, the 28-year-old actor has just scored a gig as a bank robber in a new film.
The Wrap reports that Teller will star in The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang for Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, which is based on Josh Dean's piece at The Atavist which details the true story of a gang of bank robbers in the 1980s who stole more than $10 million without ever having to fire their guns. Here's the description of the piece:
They were in and out in less than two minutes—that’s how they got away with millions. And for the duration of their reign, no bank robbers were more feared (though they never fired their guns) nor more pursued or more mythologized than the Stopwatch Gang. The members themselves were straight out of central casting: Lionel Wright, a meticulous introvert who could disappear in a room full of people; Paddy Mitchell, a charming and well-connected crook who saw an angle in everything and would go to any lengths to avoid the hell of being locked away; and Stephen Reid, a fearless point man who could find the weakness in any system and whose story—of addiction and descent into crime, of redemption and literary fame—was all prelude to a tragic but life-saving fall from grace.
In The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang, Josh Dean reconstructs the Gang’s glory days and reveals how the real story, pieced together through months of research and reporting most prominently with Reid himself, as he comes to the end, at age 64, of his final days in the custody of the state—is more remarkable than the myth that has long been told.
Sounds pretty good, right? There's no word yet about which of the men Teller will play, but I feel like he could pull off any of those roles just fine. I'm very interested to see where his career goes from here - he's a charming guy who has charisma to spare, so we'll see if he can avoid the pitfalls of off-screen life or if he turns into another Shia LaBeouf. We'll also soon see him opposite Jonah Hill in Todd Phillips' Arms and the Dudes, so keep your eyes peeled for that one.