Miles Teller and Glen Powell break from the pack as navy fighter pilots Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw and Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin in Paramount Pictures’ Top Gun: Maverick, now playing cinemas across the Philippines.
Read: Our review of Top Gun: Maverick
Miles Teller
In the 1986 Top Gun, a training accident killed Goose (Anthony Edwards), one of the most adored characters in movie history, the father of the young boy we will now meet as a man. “And I’ve got to say,” says lead star Tom Cruise of Teller’s performance as Rooster, “that guy showed up.”
There aren’t many men who could step into Goose’s shoes. Then again, Miles Teller isn’t just anyone. “I feel fortunate to carry on the Bradshaw name,” the acclaimed young star says of his beloved on-screen old man.
Going toe to toe with Cruise is a tantalizing prospect for Teller. Two actors at the peak of their powers with three decades of water under the bridge and old scores to settle. “My character, Bradley [aka Rooster], when the first movie came out, he was just a little kid,” says Teller. “And now, of course, you’re seeing him over 30 years later, so there were a lot of blanks to fill in.” And even though that meant some incredibly heavy emotional lifting at incredibly high speeds and heights, for Teller, he wouldn’t have had his time on Top Gun: Maverick any other way. “They knew how much pressure there was on what we were trying to accomplish,” he says of shooting sequences the likes of which audiences have never seen. “But we all knew that we were trying to make something really special, and that doesn’t come easy.”
Glen Powell
From topless montages to landing his own pilot’s license, no-one has embraced the joys of Top Gun more than Glen Powell. “This,” he says, “was sort of written in the stars.”
Powell was born in 1988, two years after the original Top Gun was released. But the adventures of Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell have always captivated him, to the point that he has modelled his own entire professional arc after that of its leading man. “I’ve studied Tom’s early work to navigate my own career,” Powell says. “And now that we’re friends, I don’t have to make assumptions on WWTCD (What Would Tom Cruise Do.) As a young actor in a business where everyone says the movie star is dead… I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside a guy who has been able to prove that theory wrong for three or four decades running.”
Famously pipped at the post to the role of Rooster in the movie, after Miles Teller landed the role of Goose’s son, Cruise was determined to keep Powell in the picture, working with him to create the brand-new role of Hangman. “[Tom would] say, ‘I’ve had this idea… Watch this movie and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.’ So, I started watching movies the way Tom watches movies,” says Powell. “It wasn’t just getting to work with my hero but getting to truly collaborate with my hero.” If that wasn’t enough, the star of everything from Everybody Wants Some!! to Scream Queens also came away from this movie with a bonus: his own private pilot’s license.
“At any given moment, the full wrath of aeronautical physics is trying to pull the blood from your head and black you out,” Powell says of shooting Top Gun: Maverick’s aerial scenes. “I will never take acting on the surface of the Earth for granted again.”
Top Gun: Maverick is distributed in the Philippines by Paramount Pictures through Columbia Pictures.
Photo and Video Credit: Paramount Pictures International
