Miles Teller Shows His Fighting Spirit In 'Bleed For This'

Vinny Pazienza’s return to the ring after breaking his neck is boxing’s greatest comeback. Now the subject of Bleed For This, Total Film trades blows with director Ben Younger, and stars Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart…

- James mottram

In 1991, boxer Vinny Pazienza beat then-WBA junior middleweight champion Gilbert Dele after 12 punishing rounds. The underdog going in, the man nicknamed the ‘Pazmanian Devil’ left the ring as only the second boxer in history to win both lightweight and junior middleweight world championships in his career. Yet just weeks later came an almost fatal knockout blow: a serious car crash that broke his neck in two places, forcing him to relinquish his title. The doctors said he’d never walk again, let alone climb back in the ring to fight.

The remarkable ringside drama forms the core of Ben Younger’s new movie Bleed For This, starring Whiplash’s Miles Teller as the heroic Vinny. “It’s not a boxing movie,” warns Younger, when Total Film meets him at London’s Shoreditch House over coffee. “It’s a comeback story.”  True enough. Going through gruelling rehab – defying both doctors’ orders and the odds – this fighter’s return to the ring 13 months after his accident has been dubbed the greatest comeback in boxing history.

To aid his recovery, Vinny – who later shortened his name legally to ‘Vinny Paz’ – spent three months wearing a Halo, a medieval-looking metal brace screwed into his skull in four places. Instead of recuperating in bed, he began working out in secret in his parents’ downstairs basement. “He truly was risking paralysis,” marvels Teller, perched on a Soho hotel couch in a leather jacket, jeans and boots a few weeks after TF’s encounter with Younger. “As the doctors say, any kind of slip up… you’re going to be paralysed from the neck down.”