Miles Teller Broke Out in Hives Working with Tom Cruise on ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Discovered Jet Fuel in Blood
Some people are born to be pilots. Miles Teller, though, was allergic to it.
The “Top Gun: Maverick” star, who portrays the son of late Navy aviator Goose in the sequel, revealed on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” that he suffered a reaction with “head to toe” hives after filming a pilot sequence.
“We landed, and I thought, ‘Man, I’m not feeling too good,'” Teller said. “I was really hot and I just started itching like crazy. So I got out of the jet. I’m just covered in hives. Head to toe. I go to a doctor. I do a blood analysis. I’m in an oatmeal bath that night. I have sensitive skin anyway, truth be told, Irish-Scottish skin. No dyes, no nothing.”
Turns out Teller’s blood test results showed he had “flame-retardant, pesticide, and jet fuel” in his bloodstream.
“I go to set the next day and Tom‘s like, ‘How did it go Miles? What did they find?'” Teller continued. “I was like, ‘Well, Tom, it turns out I have jet fuel in my blood.’ And without even skipping a beat Tom goes ‘Yeah, I was born with it, kid. So that was a very Tom moment for me.”
Cruise reprised his role as naval aviator Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell over 30 years after the original 1986 iconic film and was dead set on making the “Maverick” flying sequences as real as possible, which included filming actors actually piloting F-18 fighter jets. The cast had to sign waivers stating they were not afraid of flying.
“I was very clear in the beginning: ‘This is what it’s going to be like. It’s not for everyone,'” Cruise previously shared with People. “I want people to enjoy the experience. ‘If you don’t want be involved, totally, I understand.'”
Production included 14-hour workdays resulting in only 30 seconds of “good footage” usable for the final cut, with months of specifically aerial shooting culminating in an estimated 800 hours of footage. Teller shared that he almost threw up after filming, and director Joseph Kosinski called the months-long training process a “boot-camp mentality,” adding, “Nothing brings people together like group suffering.”
