Miles Teller will happily reprise his Top Gun: Maverick role in the forthcoming sequel — as long as he gets enough prep time beforehand.
“Look, you might be shocked, but I do not green light that thing. I have nothing to do,” Teller, 37, said on the Tuesday, February 4, episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “I just told Tom [Cruise], ‘Give me enough time [and a] heads up for me to get in shape. It’s one month per ab. I need [a] six-month heads up.’”
Teller further joked that isolating one ab at a time “is the only way [he] trains.”
Teller portrays pilot Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 sequel to Cruise’s 1986 flick with Val Kilmer.
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“There’s a lot of enthusiasm on the fan side [and] there’s a lot of enthusiasm on the creative side,” Teller added on Tuesday, promising he’ll pass along Colbert’s pitch for a story line in Top Gun 3.
To get in shape for Maverick and the movie’s now-iconic shirtless beach scene, Teller enlisted personal trainer Jason Walsh to get in shape.
“Tom is a huge advocate of making sure that these guys are really put through the rigors and the tests,” Walsh exclusively told Us Weekly in June 2022. “They were actually in these jets … so [it was about] physical preparation, just getting strong, moving well, make sure physically he was very fit.”
He added, “We did a lot of conditioning a couple of weeks [before] the beach scene, just to try to, like, top off, but he really didn’t need it. He was ready.”
According to Walsh, Teller was “very professional” and “took everything very seriously” when it came to adhering to the program.
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“You could just tell that this had this thing that was really going to require and push him to his limits physically. And the payoff was an incredible movie,” Walsh said. “You’ve got to get your mind right. … We had a program set that was ready to go. We followed that program. We kept track of all the numbers. Every single workout there was a progression and then of course the diet side of it is 50 percent.”
Walsh further noted that Teller worked with an “in-house dietician” to balance his fitness regimen with a healthy diet.
“For breakfast, it was six eggs and then, you know, you work out and then you have a shake and then it was two lunches. Each lunch would be chicken breast, full potato and some broccoli and I’d have two of those,” the actor said in a YouTube video at the time. “And then I remember there’ll be another snack after that. For dinner, specifically, it was 20 ounces of certain fish or steak. So you’re just eating so much. That’s really what I didn’t enjoy.”
