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A few weeks ago, a Reddit poster decided to ask about which actors audiences were being “force fed to accept” as movie stars. They had what they felt was a prime example at their fingertips: Glen Powell.
“I feel like this guys [sic] is everywhere doing anything,” the poster mused. Yet they found Powell’s work to be “all just Meh.”
This is Glen Powell’s summer. After spending decades in the Hollywood trenches, Powell is now the star of Twisters, out this week, and of Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, which he also co-wrote and produced. He’s got big glossy profiles in GQ, the Hollywood Reporter, and Vanity Fair. He’s been anointed, crowned, and feted as the next big thing.
Powell has worked for this moment. He’s been acting since he was a teenager, when he got a bit part in Spy Kids 3, and spent years toiling away as an also-ran before he reached the movie star crown. Still, his current level of omnipresence came on so suddenly that it feels jarringly abrupt.
One minute, Powell had a few supporting roles in a couple of big movies and a streaming hit or two. He was someone whose name you didn’t have to know even if you were the kind of person who pays attention to movies. Now, he’s got two big blockbusters and is the subject of multiple think pieces about how he’s the next big movie star. It can feel like whiplash.
Part of why Powell’s sudden rise feels so notable is its strangely retro vibe. Today’s ambitious young actors, like Timothée Chalamet and Florence Pugh, usually flit back and forth between Marvel or some other big action series — to build their names and paychecks — and quirky off-beat films made by auteurs that will get them critical recognition. Powell, in contrast, has stuck to the genres that conventional wisdom has long held were dead: Romantic comedies. Middlebrow adult dramas not based on an existing franchise. You know, ’90s kind of stuff.
“I’m working to try to be you,” Powell told Tom Cruise when he was cast in a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick, according to an interview in the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. But Powell also seems to know that his dream is unlikely because the industry doesn’t really make Tom Cruises anymore.
“First of all, there will never be another Tom Cruise,” he continued in the profile. “That is a singular career in a singular moment, but also movie stars of the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s, those will never be re-created.”
All the same, Powell looks an awful lot like he’s going to make a play for it — by sheer force of will, if necessary. After all, he’s had a lot of practice.
The post-movie star era
“I’ve probably been told, ‘You’ll never make it in this town’ more than any individual alive,” Powell mused to Vanity Fair earlier this year. “The odds are so slim that people hand that quote out like candy.”
Powell grew up in Austin as a kid with the film bug. As a teenager, he got cast in a single scene of 2003’s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. After that, he kept auditioning — especially for Friday Night Lights, which filmed locally.
“I auditioned for it like three or four times,” he said in GQ earlier this year. “I was really right for the role and kept not getting it.” His friends kept making it into the show instead; some of them, like Jesse Plemmons, into major roles.
Powell got his first big break when he was a senior in high school and was cast in a supporting role as a smarmy Harvard student in Denzel Washington’s 2007 film The Great Debaters. Eager to make a good impression, he wore a tuxedo to the table read.
The impression was good enough that Washington introduced Powell to his agent, the legendary Ed Limato. Powell told THR that it was Limato who told Powell that he had something and that he should think about moving to Hollywood.
All did not go smoothly for Powell when he got there . He couldn’t get cast. Within a few years of his arrival in LA, Limato died, leaving Powell without a champion. Limato’s agency dropped him. He experimented with producing and writing his own projects, and some of them sold, but most of them didn’t make development.
Part of the issue was just that Powell was young and unproven, and it takes a long time to make it in Hollywood. There was another issue, a structural problem for any kid dreaming of being a movie star: Hollywood had stopped making them in the classical sense of the term.
Movie stars have to be cultivated and built, created by the chemical reaction between the right actor and the right movie
There are still prestigious A-list actors — the Emma Stones and Chalamets of the world, who can do artsy Oscar-winning work and also headline a box office hit here and there, particularly if it’s based on familiar IP. Movie stars, though, are classically defined as the kind of actors who can headline any kind of movie, no matter what it’s about, and get audiences to show up to theaters in droves to watch them. They are Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise, Will Smith: larger-than-life charismatic figures who are so fun to watch that almost anyone will pay good money to see them do almost anything.
Movie stars don’t just arrive out of nowhere, though. They have to be cultivated and built, created by the chemical reaction between the right actor and the right movie. Historically, the right movie has been a crowd-pleasing middlebrow picture, frequently a dramatic thriller or a romantic comedy, that lays out a story in broad strokes and then depends on its star to command the screen around them.
Tom Cruise became a movie star in the raunchy coming-of-age sex comedy Risky Business, his signature commitment powering him through the iconic scene where he dances around in his underwear. Julia Roberts became a movie star when she flashed her megawatt smile at the camera in the cheesy-but-satisfying Mystic Pizza. These were movies that weren’t stupid but weren’t particularly challenging either, simple and goofy mid-budget fare that almost anyone would want to see.
In the late 2000s going into the 2010s, Hollywood pretty much stopped making that kind of movie. DVDs and then streaming, along with the rise of prestigious cable shows, eroded the audience. As the domestic box office collapsed, the international market became more important, driving a push toward spectacle-laden action franchises. The only thing reliably making money anymore was the ascendent Marvel Cinematic Universe, which in the early 2010s was just entering the so-called Phase 2.
The new financial path for studios became: Focus most of your money on a big flashy action franchise, ideally one based on familiar IP with a built-in fanbase. Allow some money on the side for movies that have a solid chance at the Oscars. Let a more intimate movie get made here and there, but give it a budget that looks like a rounding error, which means it won’t have any stars. Mid-budget movies? Those are for streaming.
In this new landscape, there was no room for movie stars. But Glen Powell kept trying.
15 years of working toward movie stardom
Powell auditioned a lot. He got close sometimes. According to an interview in GQ, he auditioned for Captain America and made it to the final round of callbacks for Han Solo. He didn’t start to pick up traction until 2014, though, and Powell’s theory is that he’s not the one who changed around then. It was the industry.
Guardians of the Galaxy was the big hit of 2014, making a star out of blond, goofy, burly Chris Pratt. Which meant Powell, also blond, goofy, and jacked, had suddenly become someone casting agents could sell as a Chris Pratt type, he told GQ. He could even be a Chris Hemsworth type, once the Thor franchise got funny.
The Chris Pratt theory is a characteristic Powell insight. Powell likes to talk straightforwardly with the press about the capricious nature of Hollywood stardom, about how much making it depends on lucky timing. Frequently, he comes off as a nerd about the business, someone who cares a lot and has spent a lot of time thinking about it. It’s the kid in the tux coming out in him, and it’s one of the things people like about him in celebrity profiles. It’s almost the opposite of the energy Powell plays onscreen, which is mostly smarmy types who have a hidden interiority.
Buoyed by the wake of Pratt’s rise, Powell got a job in 2014 in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens, playing a wealthy frat guy. Murphy liked his energy, but Powell didn’t want to be tied to TV.
It’s the kid in the tux coming out in him, and it’s one of the things people like about him in celebrity profiles
“Being a movie star was always Glen’s dream,” Murphy told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “He could have done any TV series, but he made it clear that he was chasing something. And I’d get a little mad at him, like, ‘What do you mean you’re waiting? What are you doing?’ But he was smart, and he was right.”
In 2016, Richard Linklater cast Powell in a supporting role in his college baseball hangout movie Everybody Wants Some!! There, Powell played a smooth-talking lothario, stealing the show enough to get an approving shoutout in Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review. (“Best of all … played with a runaway charm …”)
Powell was on an upswing with movies. He played supporting roles in Hidden Figures (he’s John Glenn) and The Expendables 3 (he’s the hacker). Finally, he landed his first lead in the Netflix sleeper hit Set It Up. There, Powell played a smarmy finance bro who is revealed in the end to have a vulnerable heart of gold. The film went massively and unexpectedly viral when Netflix released it in 2018, suggesting to some onlookers that it might spark a revival of the good old-fashioned ’90s romantic comedy.
Powell, meanwhile, had his sights set on the biggest ’90s throwback of all: Tom Cruise’s new Top Gun sequel. Powell auditioned for the crucial role of Goose’s son and, once again, got close, he told GQ. Not close enough: The part went to Miles Teller. Still, Cruise, who liked Powell’s screen test, offered him the part of Slayer, the equivalent of the Val Kilmer role from the original movie.
Powell said no. He didn’t think Slayer worked in the script. The kid in the tux in him who had put in a lot of time analyzing the way movies worked foresaw himself ending up all over the cutting room floor.
Cruise felt strongly enough about Powell’s potential that he personally called him to give him career guidance. If Powell really wanted to be the next Tom Cruise, he told him, the key wasn’t to pick a great role. It was to pick a great project and then make the role great. He got Powell to sign on as Slayer, and then he got Slayer rewritten into a new character, now called Hangman, who would fit Powell’s smarmy golden boy skill set.
Top Gun: Maverick was the first blockbuster of the post-pandemic era. It was also definitively Tom Cruise’s hit. Powell’s turn as Hangman wasn’t on the cutting room floor, but it wasn’t central enough to the film to be part of the narrative of its success.
For that kind of cred, Powell had to wait for Anyone But You in 2023. The second Glen Powell rom-com to unexpectedly become a huge sleeper hit, it took off not on streaming but in movie theaters. Powell says that path was an intentional choice made by both himself and co-star Sydney Sweeney.
“We said, ‘If we make this on a streamer, it won’t have any cultural impact,’” Powell told the Hollywood Reporter. “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?”
Improbably enough, the gamble worked. Anyone But You, which cost a mere $25 million to make, rode a viral TikTok dance trend straight into a $200 million box office payday. By January of this year, Glen Powell was officially the lead of a box office smash.
Reviews, however, were not kind to Anyone But You, which Vox’s own Alex Abad-Santos described straightforwardly as “bad.” (Abad-Santos did note that Powell “is solidly in his wheelhouse as a smarmy finance bro.”) To develop his critical cred, Powell returned to Everybody Wants Some!!! director Richard Linklater.
Powell brought Linklater a pitch: an old Texas Monthly article about an unassuming civilian who posed as a hit man for hire to make arrests with the Houston police. Linklater liked the premise, but he didn’t see the movie in it. Where was the arc? How did things change? Powell, in turn, proposed using the story as a jumping-off point, Linklater told the Washington Post. What happens if the fake hit man falls in love? What happens if he falls in love with someone who’s trying to hire him to kill?
In the resulting movie, Hit Man, which dropped on Netflix after two weeks in theaters earlier this summer, Linklater and Powell share a writing credit and Powell stars. The movie premiered at the Venice film festival in 2023 to a delighted reception, and this time, all the attention was on Powell. “If Glen Powell’s not already a star,” decreed Vulture, “this picture might well make him one.”
Like Top Gun: Maverick and all those rom-coms, Hit Man is a bit of a ’90s throwback. It’s a middlebrow movie for grownups that isn’t based on a comic book and has enough sex in it that its place in the international market doesn’t feel entirely secure. The kind of story that usually shows up on prestige TV these days, not the movie theater. A movie that lives and dies by the charisma and versatility of its lead actor. A movie that might never make all that much money — but that can, by god, turn a working actor into a movie star.
Glen Powell wanted to become a movie star. When Hollywood stopped making them, the kid in the tux made the kind of movie that can mint a star himself.
The test with Twisters is going to be whether Powell can prove the blockbuster draw he demonstrated with Anyone But You wasn’t just a one-off.
If Hollywood stops making movie stars, can you DIY one?
If this story makes it sound like Glen Powell is an underdog, that’s inaccurate, in the same way it was inaccurate to push that narrative about Armie Hammer a few years back. Powell is a tall and handsome white dude who could afford to stick it out through a decade or so of under-employment because he was getting mentored by Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise. He’s not an underdog. He’s doing a different thing.
The thing about Glen Powell that comes through most strongly in profiles is this: You have never read a more earnest celebrity interview than the ones he gives. This man keeps a bingo board where he tracks all the character types he wants to play. He’s currently finishing his final college credits because he thinks it would mean a lot to his mom. He’s got a book he calls an icon wisdom journal he fills with advice from his mentors, most notably Cruise. He wore that tux. He’s a hard worker who is very earnest about the value of hard work.
Powell mostly masks this earnestness by playing insufferable assholes, less a Chris Pratt than a Matt Czuchry. It may be that the closest fit onscreen to Powell’s real personality is the before character in Hit Man, mild-mannered philosophy professor Gary, before he transforms himself into a cold-blooded killer.
Yet ironically, Gary pre-transformation is one of Powell’s least convincing performances. Powell doesn’t seem to know how to fold his broad shoulders in or soften his big Hollywood grin so that he looks less than confident, even when the character he’s playing is lecturing a bored class of college students or letting his co-workers mock him to his face. Part of the reason Powell pops is that whenever he shows up on camera, he gives every evidence of believing he belongs there.
Powell seems to have applied that handsome dude confidence and that A-student earnestness for decades to chip away at the problem of how to become a movie star if you break out 15 years after Hollywood stops making those. The solution he’s hit upon is to write and produce his own material, look for roles in the genres that have previously turned actors into stars, and push for theatrical releases whenever possible.
Maybe it keeps working. Maybe it doesn’t. Everyone who rooted for Taylor Kitsch knows what it looks like when Hollywood decides an up-and-coming male star can’t pull in enough box office to be worth the investment. All of that is still to come, yet to be decided, in the fast-approaching future.
In the meantime, here we are, still in Glen Powell’s summer. His moment isn’t over yet.
