Miles Teller’s home was destroyed when the Palisades Fire ripped through his Los Angeles neighborhood last month, but he grabbed one very important item just in the nick of time.
Teller recounted his harrowing experience evacuating his home in the Pacific Palisades – an affluent neighborhood in LA’s Westside that was largely destroyed by last month’s wildfires – during Tuesday’s episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” saying that ultimately, he and his wife Keleigh Teller “grabbed very little” of their belongings before their home burned down.
On top of it all, Teller said he was caring for his grandmother at the time “because my grandfather, who I was extremely close with, had just passed away a couple of weeks before.” When they saw what they believed to be the start of the fire through their window, they had to act fast, and Teller told his grandmother to gather her things.
“We grabbed very little. We never thought that it was going to come where we were. It’s very residential,” he said of his neighborhood. “We weren’t surrounded by any brush or anything. It truly is just all, it’s a neighborhood. So many families and family-owned businesses.”
The “Top Gun: Maverick” star said that the fire “moved fast,” and that they had received a mandatory evacuation order nearly two hours after they first saw the flames from their window.
“We were watching it on TV as it’s happening and people are abandoning cars. At that point people were already grabbing their kids and running down the street. It was pretty chaotic,” he added.
In early January, several deadly and destructive wildfires leveled tens of thousands of structures to ashes across Los Angeles County. Twenty-nine people died in the blazes. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, on LA’s Eastside, are considered the most destructive fires in LA history.
Weeks after the ordeal, Teller said he and his wife are doing “alright.”
“It truly is day by day,” he said. “It is very surreal.”
