Glen Powell is the leading man of the moment in 2024.
Powell has put in the work over the years, facing ups and downs before solidifying his standing thanks to a few key roles, including appearing as a hotshot Navy pilot alongside Tom Cruise in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Cruise has very much taken Powell under his wing, even tailoring his pilot role after Powell gave him and director Joe Kosinski notes.
In the original version of “Top Gun: Maverick” Powell read, his character was known as Slayer and wasn’t a good pilot, but got into the program through nepotism. Powell recalled telling them, in an interview with British GQ, “‘If I were editing this movie, I would cut him out immediately.’”
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It was a bold move that paid off, and the role was changed to the final version of the character, named Hangman, a cocky character smoothed by Powell’s charm.
“I said my piece to Tom about what I do and what I do well, and he listened. Tom’s a listener. He listens to the crew members, he listens to his collaborators, and he hears people,” Powell told the outlet.
That led to the 35-year-old being pranked by Cruise by pretending a helicopter was going to crash, but also being put through a “film school.”
He explained the experience involved sitting in an empty theater for six hours as a video of Cruise speaking directly to camera played, breaking down everything he’s learned about filmmaking in his 40-plus-year-career.
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“The one thing I feel we’re kindred spirits in is he’s obsessed with movies,” Powell told the outlet. “That was our love language on set. I got to watch a guy who knew every department. He was able to clearly interface with everyone and be so friendly and respectful and be able to communicate that vision.”
The role and relationship were life-changing for Powell, even if he almost went broke waiting for the movie to debut.
“I’d never made any significant amount of money on a movie, including ‘Top Gun,’ and I was depleting a bank account to a point where my accountant was like, ‘This pandemic cannot last much longer,’” Powell told The Hollywood Reporter.
“But Tom was already Tom; I was waiting for my life to change,” he added.
“Top Gun: Maverick” wasn’t released until two years after production wrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but became a box office hit, in part because Cruise insisted on waiting to release it on the big screen.
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Cruise came out to support Powell at the “Twisters” premiere earlier this month. Powell shared a picture of them together with the caption, “When your Wingman follows you into the storm…”
Powell’s acting career began at 13 in his native Texas, where he landed his first film role in Robert Rodriguez’s “Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over” in 2003.
After a few other small roles, he scored his first big interaction with a leading man, Denzel Washington, after auditioning for his film “The Great Debaters.”
He told The Hollywood Reporter, “I got a call from [Washington] right afterward saying, ‘Hey, I really want you for this bigger role, [but] some of the other producers don’t believe you can pull it off. So I’m going to invite you to the table read, and I just need you to come ready to play.’”
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“I kind of misinterpreted that,” he added.
Powell was just 17 when he went to the table read, hosted by Oprah Winfrey, wearing a full tuxedo because he thought that would prove he was “ready to play.” He ultimately got the part.
That helped him move to Los Angeles, under the guidance of agent Ed Limato, who Washington introduced him to.
Limato died in 2010 when Powell was 21, and according to his interview with The Telegraph, he tried representing himself for a while.
“I was losing battery power, making 100, 300 bucks on a movie, just enough to survive,” he told the outlet.
He appeared in small parts in several films, including “The Dark Knight Rises,” but was still struggling when he self-taped an audition for “The Expendables 3,” with Sylvester Stallone.
Powell learned that he was in Stallone’s top three for the part, and made another bold move, tracking down the icon’s email address and sending him a heartfelt letter.
“… I wrote him a letter, telling him that nobody would work harder or give him a better performance. Then when I was visiting my parents a few weeks later, my phone rang and Sly was on the other end, growling ‘Welcome to Expendables.’ That was a moment that really taught me that in this business you have to fight for the career that you want,” he told The Telegraph.
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His career picked up from there, with roles in the Oscar-nominated “Hidden Figures” as astronaut John Glenn and Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” before landing a true break-out role in “Set It Up.”
“Set It Up” was a 2018 Netflix rom com co-starring Zoey Deutch, his first true leading man role, showcasing Powell’s charisma and natural chemistry with his leading lady.
“There is no doubt that Zoey and I are trying to find out what that thing is,” he told Cosmopolitan in 2023 of his and Deutch’s chemistry. “Zoey and I had a blast making that movie. Chemistry is not a problem with the two of us. So we’re trying to figure that out,” he added, noting they’d like to work together again.
Powell also showcased his chemistry with Sydney Sweeney in last year’s hit rom-com “Anyone But You.”
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During the film’s promotion, rumors swirled that the two were actually a couple, despite the fact that Sweeney is engaged to Jonathan Davino, and Powell had been dating Gigi Paris until they split mid-tour.
But Powell says they leaned into the dating rumors, at Sweeney’s suggestion.
“I’ll pretty much give Sydney all the credit for this. I don’t have the mental capacity to pull anything like this off, but she’s very smart,” Powell told Business Insider of leaning into the dating rumors. “She’s very smart. And look, Sydney and I do have authentic chemistry. I had such a wonderful journey with her on this thing.”
“Anyone But You” took home almost $220 million at the box office, and Powell said he sees opportunity for future collaborations with Sweeney.
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“Sydney and I want to get back in the trenches together,” he said on “Sunday Today with Willie Geist.“
“It’s like Julia [Roberts] and George [Clooney]. You know, Matthew [McConaughey] and Kate [Hudson]. You know these people that work together over and over and over again,” he said.
He did admit in his recent THR interview that the chaotic environment was a little overwhelming, but advice from Cruise helped guide him.
“I kept coming back to something that Cruise had said, which was, ‘The world’s going to become really loud, and it’s your decision how much you turn up or down the volume,’” he recalled, “because the world did get really loud, but I didn’t know where those dials were. I was like, ‘I know we talked about this, but I don’t know how to work this console.’ Meanwhile, Sydney, through ‘Euphoria’ had been on this ride and she was like, ‘This is all good.’”
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“It’s more fun once you understand where that knob is,” he added later. “And I got to turn it up, and then I got to turn it down.”
Fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey even gave Powell key advice and inspired him to leave Los Angeles for his native Austin.
He told The Hollywood Reporter in May that McConaughey encouraged him, saying, “He’s like, ‘Hollywood is the Matrix, man. You plug in and it’s all fake world.’’’
Powell continued, “He’s like, ‘Then I go to Austin, and I unplug. It’s all real. Those are my friends, that’s my family, my actions matter there.’ And he’s right.”
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“If you’re here, you live in the Matrix all the time, there’s no separation of those worlds,” he said of Hollywood.
Though he’s leaving the physical city behind, Powell is displaying plenty of show biz savvy.
He served as an executive producer on his WWII drama “Devotion” in 2022 and produced and co-wrote his 2023 film “Hit Man,” a critical success and streaming success on Netflix.
But like Cruise, Powell is looking to push for more theatrical releases.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, he explained that “Anyone But You” had “offers from every streamer, and it was guaranteed [paydays] and a much bigger budget, but [Sydney Sweeney] and I really have a very similar worldview about Hollywood. We said, ‘If we make this on a streamer, it won’t have any cultural impact.’ And everyone was saying rom-coms were dead theatrically, so we knew we could get hosed, but we thought, ‘Let’s take the gamble,’ because what if we could bring them back?”
Speaking with The Telegraph, he also noted that rom-coms had been declared a “dead” genre, but the film proved the opposite.
“One of the things that I’ve realized recently is that when studios say a genre is dead, all it means is that there’s a huge opportunity, because a market is not being served,” Powell told the outlet.
“The business stopped making romantic comedies, apparently, because romantic comedies weren’t making any money in theatres. But my belief is there’s no problem facing Hollywood that can’t be solved by a really good movie.”
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And Powell is eager to deliver on that promise.
He turned down a role in the upcoming “Jurassic Park” reboot, surprising many.
“‘Jurassic’ is one of my favorite movies. It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I’m not doing that movie because I read the script and I immediately was like, my presence in this movie doesn’t help it,” he explained to THR. “And the script’s great. The movie’s going to f—ing kill. It’s not about that. It’s about choosing where you’re going to make an audience happy and where you’re going to make yourself happy.”
Powell also aims to make audiences across the country happy, telling The Telegraph last week, “Having grown up in and around Texas, I’m aware there are vast parts of America that have been underserved in terms of movies that they want to see.”
He continued, “You sort of have New York and Los Angeles making the decisions about what gets made, but there’s a whole lot more audience out there you need to think about.”
His latest film, “Twisters,” is the sequel to the 1996 hit “Twister,” starring Helen Hunt and another fellow Texan, the late Bill Paxton.
Looking ahead, he has a full slate as well, including the dramatic thriller “Huntington,” a legal drama, “Monsanto,” a remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit “The Running Man,” and “Top Gun 3.”
“I know it’s a lot,” he told The New York Times, “but I’m kind of going full-tilt right now for a reason. There is a moment in Hollywood when you have political capital, and you have to spend it before you lose it.”
