Miles Teller Recalls Car Accident That Nearly Killed Him: ‘Cops Thought I Was Dead’

When it comes to Miles Teller's new role as a man fighting back from a near-fatal car accident, it's sadly a case of art imitating life.

In Bleed For This, which hits theaters Friday (November 18), Teller plays Vinny Pazienza, a boxer who's nearly killed in a collision. And the experience of filming was all too familiar for Teller, whose own 2007 accident left him destroyed and scarred.

"Usually there’s something in a movie you can relate to from a pretty honest place,” he told CBS News. “For me, I got ejected from a car that was going 80 miles an hour that flipped eight times when I was 20 years old, and the EMT told me 99.9 percent of the time the car rolls over, you get paralyzed, so I was very fortunate. I was 50 feet away from the car; the cops saw me covered in blood and thought I was dead."

Teller added that the shared experience helped him to identify with Pazienza, who famously went on to beat middleweight champion Luis Santana after 13 months of physical therapy.

"I can relate to a bit of the darkness, the introspection and hearing those questions you ask yourself afterward," he said. "I was in that situation — not as severe as Vinny’s — but I had all these casting directors and directors tell my agent, ‘Miles is a good actor, but it doesn’t make sense for the character to have scars,’ and then you start thinking, ‘Yeah.’ This career thing you always envisioned for yourself is kind of taken away from you. When [Pazienza] is packing up his boxing posters — this thing that you love so much and thinking that it’s done — I felt that."

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