AT HOME WITH MILES TELLER

After a “perfect” proposal (on an African safari!), the in-demand actor gets ready to wed model Keleigh Sperry and takes on challenging new movie roles

The hot-property actor talks about life and love.

For Miles Teller, proposing to his girlfriend of four years, model Keleigh Sperry, 25, required a gesture grander than a romantic dinner or walk on the beach. So the actor, 30, popped the question during an African safari. With elephants roaming in the background, Teller led Sperry to a tree with a rose and note tied to it reading “May 11th, 2013– August 20th, 2017.” On one knee he told her, “This was the first day that I asked you to be my girlfriend, and today was the last day you woke up as my girlfriend.” Sperry was floored. “It was perfect,” she says of the proposal. “I’ll never get the image out of my head of him down on one knee with a tear in his eye. He really thought about every detail and was so nervous!”

Teller, who broke out in 2014’s Oscarnominated Whiplash and the Divergent movie series, has been thoughtful about his career as well, with weighty real-life roles in two new films— Thank You for Your Service, in which he plays Sgt Adam Schumann, an Iraq War veteran struggling with PTSD, and Only the Brave, where he plays Brendan Mcdonough, the sole survivor of a wildfire that killed 19 Arizona firefighters in 2013. Teller, who grew up in Florida and studied drama at New York University, says he’s grateful to have found success and love, even if he’s not at the top of the A-list: “I’m not Leonardo Dicaprio. All the best roles aren’t in a hat and I can just close my eyes and pick one. But I’ve been fortunate that the movies I’ve done recently have been stories that

I feel really passionate about.”

He and Sperry met at a 2013 Grammy afterparty, where Teller worked up the nerve to approach her despite feeling she was “way out of my league. We just clicked. After the first date I told my buddy, ‘I think I’m going to be with this girl for a long time.’ ”

They recently moved into a sprawling home in LA’S Studio City with their French bulldog Bugsy and are in the early stages of wedding planning. “We definitely want something smaller and intimate,” says Sperry. “But I’m the last of six kids, so nothing is ever actually small!”

The actor would also like to start a family. “One of my friends said, ‘Man, don’t you wish you were 23 again?’ Absolutely not,” says Teller. “As you get older, hopefully you find somebody in your life that you can put before you. It’s nice to let that person know, ‘I can go without all this other stuff, but I can’t go without you.’ ”