It’s the day after the premiere and after party for his latest film, Whiplash, and Miles Teller has certainly felt better. “Hungover,” he admits as he arrives to meet up at his neighborhood coffee spot in Hollywood. But this guy deserves a wild night out: For the last two years, the 27-year-old has been ricocheting between thoughtful indies like The Spectacular Now and big-budget studio affairs like Divergent, culminating in this weekend’s Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s riveting drama that debuted to raves (and awards) at January’s Sundance Film Festival. Teller stars as Andrew, a jazz drummer at an elite music conservatory who wants so badly to be a musical great that he not only forfeits all personal relationships, he also withstands the emotional and physical abuse of a fiercely intimidating instructor (J.K. Simmons).

Teller shares not only Andrew’s musical talent, but also his drive. He says he hasn’t taken a break in two years, and after making the promotional rounds for Whiplash (for which he’s drumming up Oscar buzz), he’ll head to Rhode Island to shoot the indie boxing drama Bleed for This. He’s already wrapped two other potential big hits: Next year’s Divergent follow-up, Insurgent, and the new Fantastic Four reboot, in which he’ll star as Reed Richards. As if that wasn’t enough to keep him occupied, Teller also had to deal with an online brouhaha last month, when he was quoted as saying he felt “dead inside” after wrapping Divergent, forcing the Philadelphia-area native to vehemently (and very frankly) defend himself. “In all my interviews, I am very candid,” he told Yahoo Movies. “I don’t censor myself, but also I’m very proud of the career I have. I’m not a f—king bad person. I don’t think I’m better than anybody so I don’t really worry too much about what comes out of my mouth.” Indeed, Teller didn’t hold back as we peppered him with questions about his life in the movies.

How much musical experience did you have prior to Whiplash?

I grew up playing piano, then I played saxophone for a little bit. I was in the high school band, and I had a drum set when I was, like, 15. I never took a drum lesson — I took piano and saxophone lessons. But I always took my drum kit with me.

You had a high-school rock band as well, right?

Yeah. We called ourselves The Mutes, because we were playing at homecoming court, and right when we were supposed to start jamming out, the power in our generators went out.

And how would you rate your skills now? Could you go out there and vibe with a jazz band?

If they were playing [Hank Levy’s] “Whiplash” or [Duke Ellington’s] “Caravan,” I could, because I know those songs pretty much by heart. It’s hard, though. Jazz is the highest form of percussion.

In Whiplash, Andrew drums so hard that his hands bleed. Did actually happen to you during filming?

Yeah. I’d show up on set, and there would be blood on the cymbals and all this s—t. I’m like, “Damien [who is a former jazz musician], how realistic is this? I don’t want to lose our audience by just being this outlandish with it.” But he said that, when he was playing all the time, his hands were all torn up. And when I started practicing four hours a day for weeks [for the film], I started getting blood blisters. So it was pretty real.

How much of the on-screen drumming did you actually perform?Apart from a couple of inserts [with a stand-in] while I was doing something else, 90 percent of it is me. And then other times you have to sweeten up [the sound] in the studio because we didn’t have the right mics [during filming].

The film was based on a short film Damien had made a year earlier. Did you talk to the actor [Johnny Simmons] who played your character in the original?

No. I didn’t even watch the short until way after we were done filming. And I had never seen anything of Damien’s. I just knew the script was really good.

J.K. Simmons is just ferocious in this film. He’s constantly antagonizing you, sometimes very slyly and other times very outright. It’s so different from that nurturing dad he played in Juno. Were you surprised to see him go so dark?

No. I’ve never seen him in anything. I never saw Juno. I’ve seen like five minutes of a lot of s—t. I know him from the Farmers Insurance commercials. Oh, [and] I saw him in Spider-Man.