Making Glen Powel Happen

Whether it’s from his sky-rocketing role as the lead in Anyone but you (alongside Sydney Sweeney), or next to Tom Cruise in the box-office smash, Top Gun 2: Maverick, or even with Zoey Deutch as the enduring romantic lead in the straight-to-Netflix rom-com, Set It Up, Glen Powell’s versatility and intelligence as an actor sits him on the precipice of success.

With his project portfolio growing bigger and bigger, with a lead-role in John Patton Ford’s dark comedy Huntington glimmering on his desk, or Edgar Wright’s Stephen King-adaptation, The Running Man, it’s no surprise that he’s hot-in-demand.

Young Mr. Powell was born in Austin, Texas to Glen Powell Snr, a coaching executive and Cyndy, a homemaker. Glen grew up a huge sports fan, taking time out to watch and play football with his dad.

‘Favourite place on the planet,’ Glen said about Austin in an interview for Anyone but you in 2023 with WIRED alongside his costar, Sydney Sweeney. ‘The family’s there, The Texas Longhorns are there – going to the play-offs, lets go!’ His playful and slightly goofy nature made Sydney squeal in embarrassment, then. But it’s with his cool nature that it’s all part of the package. It was all in good spirits. His excitement was palpable.

On the other side of his personality (when he wasn’t playing football or lacrosse) Glen was also a full-blown theatre-nerd. As a kid, he joined musical theatre groups and learned how to tap dance. He used his theatricality in real-life situations too. He helped his sister, Leslie, sell Girl Scout biscuits, for example, offering himself as the sales-pitch.

‘He had us make signs that said “free gift with every purchase”,’ Leslie told New York Times about her brother. ‘We hung them up around the neighborhood and then he would hide in some honeysuckle bushes and come out after a purchase and sing Elvis songs.’ He was the gift, of course.

The actual mechanics of being on stage itself intrigued Glen greatly, which became apparent when he directed and produced three films later in his life. For one of his first school projects he completely changed his family’s barn in Texas to a soundstage to show Steven Spielberg’s use of special effects. What a little legend.

Reportedly, he put a green screen on the project and presented his talk to the class in front of a torrential sea storm! His imagination went wild with creativity.

‘After seeing Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,’ he told Gio journal, ‘after Apollo 13, I wanted to be an astronaut; after Cool Runnings, I wanted to be a Jamaican bobsledder; after Braveheart, I wanted to re-liberate Scotland. After Raiders of the Lost Ark, I begged my parents to buy me a bullwhip.’

It was during an interview with Jennifer Hudson last year on her talk-show that Glenn confessed to how mischievous he really was.

‘It was the last day of eighth grade and I wanted to pull a prank, so I decided to release 3,000 crickets in the hallway right before lunch. There’s like this funnel in the hallway where everybody just sprints out of class and runs through. I thought it’d be funny to release 3,000 crickets in that hallway right before the bell rang.’ Most probably what spurred his sudden ‘creative streak’ in Glen’s personality was the fact that he had already got himself an acting agent and scored roles as a young star. Naturally, he would’ve been feeling on-top-of-the-world and feeling quite confident in himself. A bit too confident some would say.

Still at school, he landed a role in the 2007 film, The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington. For his first ever read-through, the young Powell turned up dressed in a tuxedo and reportedly caught the eye of legendary Hollywood agent, Ed Limato. Ed Limato, for those of you who don’t know, had a pretty hefty clientele list (before his unfortunate death in 2010) with such names as Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Dennis Quaid, to name but a few.

Powell signed with Ed straight away, but only on the promise that he would complete his schooling and gain university entrance before pursuing any chance of acting. So, with his parents in tow, he got through, and they took him to auditions but only on their watches. One time, reportedly, his mum turned up at his school when he was still in class, took him outside (where there was a producer and stunt-man in the carpark), auditioned for a role, got hit by a car eight times (safely, of course) and then returned Glen back to class half-an-hour later. What a boss move.

Upon graduating from high school, and gaining entry into the University of Texas in 2008, Powell was called up late one night by a flustered Limato. He urged Powell to drop everything, uproot his life and move to LA. ‘If you want to pursue an acting career,’ he was told by Limato, ‘now is the time to do it!’ And he did. He dropped everything (much to his family’s disdain) and flew all the way to the City of Angels, 2216km from his home in Austin.
With a brief stint of trying his luck at any audition he could land (in which he was told countless times that the best role he would land is that of a dead body) he lost hope in his dream. So he tried his hands at full-time script reading for producer, Lynda Obst, who produced classic films, such as How to Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Sleepless In Seattle and Flashdance.

‘I really got a chance to understand how [Lynda] saw the genre and to get a world-class education in producing,’ Powell told Vogue in 2023. ‘One thing that really defined Lynda is her ability to make really compelling, awesome rom-coms. As a script reader for her, I had the real benefit of reading several rom-coms a day for submissions.’
As well as being a script-reader, he tried out auditioning in his spare time for numerous films, such as Friday Night Lights, Cowboys & Aliens and The Longest Ride, to no avail.

‘I really feel like Hollywood is made up of actors who are in fashion,’ Powell told GQ in 2022. ‘What everyone does is they end up writing for that thing. All of a sudden, when Robert Pattinson comes along, they’re like, “We want a brooding Robert Pattinson type.” You see it in every script.’

His looks did have a role to play here. He’s a good lookin’ bloke, so as soon as he took a step into the audition room, he was instantly labeled a meat-head, as it were. A fraternity-jock. A guy who scores all the hot cheerleaders and captains the college football team. One of those geezers. Even if you are to look at his Wikipedia page, under the character description for 2012’s Stuck In Love, he is described as ‘Good Looking Frat Guy’. I can relate to him in this aspect. Whenever I land roles in TV I too am called hot by production. The perils of being attractive, right.

It was in 2016 that he landed a role as John Glenn in the biographical drama, Hidden Figures, about three African American women mathematicians who worked for NASA during the space race. Powell was awarded a Screen Actors Guild award for that role. What a growing talent.

After months and months of hitting that grind of auditioning, he started landing those small roles in bigger films, getting his teeth buried into proper characters that he could learn from. I guess by keeping to his values and working harder and harder. He landed the lead role of Chad Radwell in the Ryan Murphy-run comedy-horror series, Scream Queens and stayed on the show until his character’s untimely death in Season 2. Many online have garnered this as being Powell’s best role to date.

‘So many actors have this moment where you become a celebrity, and then you have to figure out the talent behind it,’ Powell told GQ in 2022. ‘I’ve had the benefit of this slow thing where it’s like nobody knows who I am. I’m happy to do what I’m doing now, which is nonstop. I work all night, I get up, I rehearse, and write and rewrite, and do it all again—that’s great, because I’m actually making a movie. It’s the first time in my whole career, where I think I’ve felt like, “Oh, s**t. I think we’re gonna do this.”’
I think that moment came when Powell auditioned, originally, for Miles Teller’s role of Rooster for the sequel to the 1986 film, Top Gun, Top Gun: Maverick. Instead of landing the role of Rooster in 2018, he was cast as LT Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin, an F/A-18E pilot and mission commandeer of the Naval Air Force.

‘Went in to audition…Felt great about it…Then I got a phone call that I wasn’t going to get to play Rooster. I’m a very patriotic guy. I literally was wearing an American flag tank-top when I got that call. Then I got a call from [Tom] Cruise a few days later who really wanted me to do the movie. I sat down [with him] a few days later. He was like: “what kinda career do you want?”. I was like: “you, man, I wanna be you.”’

Top Gun: Maverick follows Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (played by Cruise) still going after thirty years of service as being one of the Navy’s top aviators. In the film Mitchell and the other wannabe Top Gun graduates must face a challenge greater than the US Navy themselves. They must make the ultimate sacrifice too. Very good film, if you haven’t watched it.

This role really was a shot for Powell to enter the big leagues. It’s quite cool to think that one of the films that he adored watching with his dad was Top Gun.
After that phone conversation with Tom, the two actually became the best of pals, and Cruise took Powell under his wing as his apprentice. A like-minded workaholic, Tom helped Powell learn how to fly for the role and took him for helicopter flights around London. He even enrolled him in the prestigious ‘Tom Cruise Film School’ which basically was Glen sitting in an empty movie theatre and watching Tom on the screen for six hours. Cruise had designed a ‘boot camp’ for the other actors too, to train them with flying roles to get the actors used to aerobatics and g-force.

‘The funniest thing is flying,’ Powell told GQ in 2022. ‘It was like he had set up a whole flying school. He literally said, “Okay, this is what an airplane is. This is how things fly. This is how air pressure works…’”

The film, I kid you not, brought home a whopping USD$1.5 billion in the box office, and received outstanding reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. The critics truly loved it and audiences too.

‘For Tom [Cruise], he’s always trying to get audiences to lean in,’ Powell told Chris Bumbray from JoBlo Celebrity Interviews via Zoom in 2022, ‘and feel the movie. It’s either information on emotion. Ideally it’s always emotion. If you’re feeling what the character is going through and it’s not just a passive ‘I’m-just-watching-planes-fly-around’, then that’s something you can’t fake. It’s for the fans.’

It was certainly all for the fans, alright. Off the back of Top Gun: Maverick, and putting him in a very different role, was his portrayal as Ben in the romantic-comedy, Anyone But You, directed by American filmmaker, Will Gluck. Funly enough, Powell’s parents played cameo roles in the film.

‘I personally think it’s one of the better rom-coms out there,’ Powell admitted to The Movie Report in 2023. ‘Sydney is great in this. She does comedy with a hair-drier like no body I’ve seen before…’ Her looks at Sydney, sat beside him, who is all giggly.

In the same year, Powell played the lead role, as mild-mannered professor of psychology and philosophy in the 2023 film, Hit Man, with critical acclaim. Directed by Richard Linklater and inspired by a true story, the film tells of a professor moonlighting as a hit man who sorts out the city police department. Upon his numerous attempts, he unknowingly descends into dangerous, dubious territory.

Powell is also credited as the co-writer on the film, which just shows his remarkable talents. Powell and Linklater actually wrote the entire film during the pandemic, so both were in isolation.

‘I don’t know if Rick washes his hands, so I wouldn’t want to work off the same computer as him,’ Powell joked in an interview with Los Angeles Times alongside the director. ‘He probably doesn’t shower. The dirty, sticky keyboard—I just don’t trust it.’ That jokester is shining out there. ‘But no, it was quick, and easy, and effortless.’
The film got wide-spread acclaim on its release in selected cinemas and Netflix, where it still stands as being a heavy-hitter with the rankings.

The New York Times deemed it a ‘genuine star-clinching turn’ for Powell, and Empire wrote that Glen ‘announces himself as a movie star and a filmmaking force to be reckoned with’.

Hilariously, coming from a family who loves a practical joke or two, during the premiere of Hit Man, his mother (who always seems to turn up to her son’s premieres) held up a sign which read: ‘Stop Trying To Make Glen Powell Happen’.

Powell, through and through, seemed to feel more comfortable being the funny-guy on screen, but his yearning to resemble the new Tom Cruise paved its path after Hit Man and Anyone But You.

He didn’t want to resemble that Robert Pattinson type he thought he’d become from his early-days in Hollywood. He wanted to create characters that mattered.
So he inserted himself back into the thriller genre with the Lee Isaac Chung disaster film, Twisters, starring Daisey Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, with Powell, of course, starring in the lead role as a storm-chasing YouTube star, Tyler Owens. It features, in Powell’s own words, ‘one of the most incredible action scenes of all time.’ As his hero (and buddy) Tom Cruise did in Top Gun: Maverick, Powell was determined to do all his own stunts.

‘It’s a completely physical experience, because the investment you have to make as an actor is like, it can’t be delicate,’ he said in an interview with Fandango’s Big Ticket. ‘It can’t be tender. Tornadoes are not tender. You have to put your body on the line to sell that experience.’

What with more roles being thrown at him left-right-and-center, Glen Powell has certainly taken life and the passion he has for his career by the short-and-curlies and giving it all he has. Reportedly he’s moved back to Texas to be closer to his family, fully supports the Texas Longhorn football team and spends his down-time with his pet dog and monkey (because why not). Whether it’s in one of his break-out roles on TV or film, being a likable personality on the red carpet or in front of the camera or being the chillest dude in Hollywood, Powell’s is doing all he can to prove himself.

If that doesn’t sound like enough, he’s also trying to finish his degree. He knows that he left University in a bit of a rush, dropping out to head to Hollywood.

‘I think it’s really important for my mum and it’s more of an emotional thing for me,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. ‘Plus, I’m so close to it, I can taste it. I kept telling my friends I was going to have the graduation party of the century.’

But I’m sure Powell’s future is set in stone as he ascends his stardom. He’s earnt it. So no matter what, there’ll always be another role for him to play, he’ll always come back.

‘I think there’s a natural breathing pattern in Hollywood, where you give it your all, you’re in everyone’s face, and then you disappear for a while and they make you miss it, and then you come back. You have to buy into the longer journey. Trust the decades-long career rather than the short and intense one.’

Glen Powell’s is now considered the second-most bankable actor in the glitzy bizz of Hollywood (according to Vogue), right behind Timothee Chalamet. It’s pretty clear to see why. He’s got the look too. He looks like a movie star. With a charming, chill and cool-as-they-come persona, the actor’s abilities transcend off the screen too. He’s been making waves lately with his talents.

With a huge portfolio of projects ahead of him, including Family Guy’s Halloween Special, A24’s Huntington, Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man, and Top Gun’s third, highly anticipated sequel, Powell isn’t taking a break any time soon.