Miles Teller’s Scars: What He’s Said About His Face Scars & The Accident That Caused Them

Miles Teller was a 20-year-old college student when he was the passenger in a car crash that left him with pretty severe facial injuries. Once his face healed, Miles was left with scars on his face and neck, which he still has today. Since the 2007 crash, Miles has publicly spoken about the face scars and how they’ve affected him.

In 2007, Miles was in the passenger seat of a car that his friend was driving during a horrifying accident. “My buddy lost control of my car going 80 miles per hour,” Miles revealed to ABC in 2016. “We flipped eight times. I got ejected out the window. The car landed and I was just laying, like, 50 feet from the car, unconscious, covered in blood. My buddy thought I was dead.” Miles was in between his sophomore and junior years of college when the accident took place. He and his friend were driving home from a music festival, and the car flew over three lanes of traffic as Miles flew out the window.

Fifteen years later, Miles still has the scars on his face, as well as two pieces of gravel embedded in his cheeks. The doctors opted not to remove the rocks, as they were worried it would cause more scarring. For three or so years after the accident, Miles had to undergo laser treatments to try and diminish some of the scarring, as well. He described the experience as “very painful” in an interview with Esquire.

The car accident took place in Florida, and there was another passenger in the backseat of the vehicle, as well. Both the driver and backseat passenger were okay. “Everything was fine except for my face,” Miles admitted to The Guardian in 2016. In addition to the face scars, Miles also had a broken wrist and needed 20 staples put in his shoulder after the crash.

In the aftermath of the crash, Miles said it was difficult for him to book movie roles because the powers that be thought it “didn’t make sense” for his character to have facial scars. However, director John Cameron Mitchell was able to look past the scars, booking Miles for his breakout role in Rabbit Hole in 2010. “[He] was like, ‘I love [the scars]. It tells a secret,” Miles revealed.

Meanwhile, Miles’ relationships with his college friends at New York University were also affected by the crash. His friend who had been driving the car was his junior year roommate. Miles, who stars in the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick movie alongside Tom Cruise, insisted that he never blamed his friend for what happened. However, tension mounted between them when Miles sued the friend’s insurance company in the months that followed the accident.

“I was racking up all these medical bills, so we had to sue his insurance because he was driving,” Miles explained in the Esquire interview. “It’s not like we’re suing HIM. We’re suing his insurance. He comes to me, he’s like, ‘Miles, I don’t know if we can be friend when my parents’ insurance premiums are going to go up.’ I just sat with that for, like, 24 hours, and after that I was like, ‘Man, [expletive] you. I’ve never made you feel bad for this. For you to make me feel guilty and make me feel like you’re the victim here, that’s really [expletive] up.” Miles said that his other pals went on to live with the friend from the accident, and it caused him to lose touch with all of his friends from college.

After getting cast in 2010’s Rabbit Hole, though, Miles went on to have a successful film career, with films like Whiplash, Divergent, War Dogs and more on his resume. He also started dating his now-wife, Keleigh Sperry, in 2013. The pair got married in September 2019.

In December 2016, Miles was actually involved in another scary car accident with Keleigh. The incident occurred when an Uber driver made a left turn unsafely and crashed into Miles’ truck, which he was driving with Keleigh in the passenger seat. The truck flipped over, but luckily, both Miles and Keleigh were okay. “Me and [Keleigh] are okay. I hope the other passengers are as well,” Miles tweeted at the time. “The other driver pulled into oncoming traffic and a bad accident was unavoidable. This woman’s irrational and ignorant decision put our lives and her passengers lives in very real danger. Happy we could walk away.”