Not only has Powell gained credibility among critics by becoming a regular weapon in Richard Linklater’s arsenal – most recently in the action-comedy Hit Man, which Powell co-wrote – but he might also be on the verge of reliable blockbuster stardom. After an attention-grabbing supporting role in the massively successful Top Gun: Maverick, Powell stars in the disaster film Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 smash hit featuring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.
Paxton, admired for grounding big-budget productions with palpable humanity, is a hard act to follow. Sceptics raise an eyebrow at Powell, who has been described as the next Matthew McConaughey because of his wide grin, chiselled look and Texan geniality.
He is already set to expand his résumé with a diverse slate of film and television projects – plus a potential Broadway musical – and keeps a notebook full of advice from the likes of Tom Cruise. But does that translate to trajectory? Is Powell the next McConaughey or Cruise? Could he become a Paul Newman or a Robert Redford, earning artistic respect on par with his jawline and smile wattage?
If you call up the experts – say one, or two, or eight people who have worked with Powell sometime in his 22-year career – they’ll tell you this isn’t a flash in the pan. Powell is one of the hardest-working actors around, they say. He gets to know every person on a set. He’s the real deal.
But in Hollywood, as Powell himself has long been aware, nothing is guaranteed.
“There’s been a lot of talk, and I’ve had to answer, ‘Is Glen a movie star?’” Linklater says. “Anyone who’s worked with Glen in the past 10 years knows he’s a f***ing movie star. That’s not really a question. Does the culture even have a place for a new movie star is the bigger question.”
The Hollywood Reporter recently deemed Powell a member of “the new A-list” thanks to “the one-two punch” of festival darling Hit Man and the romantic comedy Anyone But You, which grossed US$220 million worldwide – numbers unheard of for the genre these days. But in this age of superhero franchises and obscure streaming algorithms, the traditional definition of a movie star, who can carry an opening weekend, seems almost extinct.
Though Netflix claims Hit Man performed well by landing in its “Global Top 10″ list three weeks in a row, Powell is not yet a proven leading man at the box office. Universal is positioning Twisters as a “tentpole” movie, betting on the combined effect of its stars and spectacle.
The film’s fate could help determine Powell’s.
Last year, Powell found a valuable business partner in Sydney Sweeney, his Anyone But You co-star. He went along with her idea to lean into (false) dating rumours as a way to keep making headlines during the lead-up to the romcom’s release. That part of the plan worked out, but the film was still a slow burn at the box office. (After making just $6m in its opening weekend, it became a global hit.)
Writer-director Will Gluck naturally attributes the word-of-mouth momentum to audiences falling “in love with Syd and Glen”, which required the very pretty human beings to seem, well, relatable.
“When you have someone who looks like Glen, you need a character who is kind of self-effacing as well,” Gluck says. “It’s hard to pull off. I had long talks with Glen about how I’d want him to play it. ‘How far are you willing to go to take the shine off your penny?’ He was 100% game.”
While some actors might shy away from romcoms, afraid to be typecast or not taken seriously, Powell acknowledges their staying power. He was raised on the genre in northwest Austin, where he grew up as the middle kid between two sisters, Lauren and Leslie. The Powell siblings watched, then rewatched, movies such as 10 Things I Hate About You and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. They quoted Legally Blonde to one another. At Austin Studios, Powell earnestly argues that romcoms are “the most universal film language” because “we all share the desire to love and be loved”.
Of course, love tends to be imperfect and messy – and romcoms only work if the central characters also reveal themselves as such. As a leading man in the genre, Powell says: “You’re there to look stupid and you’re there to have fun and you’re there to be vulnerable. That’s it.” There isn’t much room for pride or ego. You’ve got to be in on the joke, or the joke is on you.
Powell broke out with another romantic comedy: the 2018 Netflix film Set It Up, in which he and Zoey Deutch play overworked assistants who try to lighten their workloads by tricking their temperamental bosses into falling for each other. Powell’s character is a bit of a finance bro. Screenwriter Katie Silberman says the actor’s “inherent warmth” allows him to thrive “when he’s playing a jerk – at the beginning, at least – because you care about him so much that you want him to get what he wants.”
Think of Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail, she says. Why else would you root for the big-box villain?
“There’s a saying: To play dumb you have to be really smart, and to play mean you have to be really kind,” Silberman continues. “There is such a deep, undeniable joy and warmth in [Powell] that allows you to take that and run with it in whatever direction you’re going.”
This quality is an asset in any genre, including disaster films. While casting the Twisters role of Tyler Owens, a self-described “tornado wrangler” whose storm-chasing antics have amassed a substantial YouTube following, Chung (“Minari”) looked for a performer with a “deep well of empathy and seriousness and goodness in them” to balance the cockiness. He wasn’t sure whether Powell was that guy. Then Chung stumbled upon one of Powell’s morning show appearances.
Powell had brought along his parents, Glen Sr. and Cyndy, who have long supported his acting career. Watching Powell goof around with his parents, Chung realised what the actor could bring to Twisters.
“I suddenly saw this side of him that really reveals who he is as a person – his upbringing and his relationship to his family. Underneath it all, he has this deep humanness.”
Parents love to brag about their children but Cyndy brings the receipts. Powell’s kindergarten teacher once told his parents he had a remarkable presence and “was either going to be an actor or president”, she says. (Maybe he’ll be both, the way everyone talks about this guy. He is 35.)
After Powell turned in a middle-school poetry assignment, his teacher suspected him of plagiarism because, she said, “there is no way a sixth-grader could have written this”. She called his parents in and asked him to respond to a writing prompt while seated in their view. The teacher read his work and said, as Cyndy recalls, “I really have to apologise to you and Glen.”
The family motto has always been to “advance on all fronts”, Cyndy says. When the kids showed an interest in something new, she and their father, an executive coach for corporations, encouraged them to try it out. Powell was an athletic child but he also ran around with a video camera. After he landed an agent and was cast in Spy Kids 3D, Cyndy accompanied him to Austin Studios, where he hovered around various crew members, unofficially shadowing them.
“If I couldn’t find him on set, he was with the DP or behind a cameraman,” she says.
Powell has returned to the studio lot to work with the Austin Film Society, which Linklater founded. The day after he gives me a tour of what he remembers from working on Spy Kids 3D – the site of the basketball incident is a highlight, as is the green screen where he shot his scene – the actor is inducted into the Texas Hall of Fame. His parents join him on the red carpet, trolling their son with signs that read, “Stop Trying to Make Glen Powell Happen” and “It’s Never Gonna Happen”.
Also present at the ceremony? Powell’s high school teacher F.J. Schaack, who says Powell was “the only one writing screenplays” in his creative writing class. Schaack texts me a few photographs of Powell’s assignments from back then. They are unmistakably the work of a teenage boy. A screenplay excerpt describes a county jail inmate mooning a woman from inside his cell. An ode to Christopher Walken admires how the actor is “flawed to the point of perfection”.
Schaack was the one to introduce Powell to Linklater’s work, including Dazed and Confused (1993) and Before Sunrise (1995). Soon after, Powell landed a tiny role in Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller Fast Food Nation. But it wasn’t until he auditioned to play a cheerfully pompous baseball player in the sports comedy Everybody Wants Some!! nearly a decade later that he left a real impression on the director. “He came in swaggering as this charming, charismatic, good-looking, smouldering, young-adult man,” says Linklater, who recalls thinking to himself, “Holy s***, when did Glen Powell get so crazy smart and funny?”
During the pandemic, Powell emailed Linklater to discuss a 2001 Texas Monthly article he had read about Gary Johnson, an unassuming man who posed as a professional hitman while working with the Houston police. He wore a wire to collect evidence to use in court against the people ordering hits. Linklater said something like, “Great. I’ve been obsessed with that for years. Here’s why I don’t think it works as a movie.” The events were too repetitive. There was no clear story arc.
Linklater credits Powell with having the idea to use the Texas Monthly piece as a jumping-off point. “I was like, ‘You can do that?’” the director says. The article ends with a story about Johnson helping a woman seek therapy and safe shelter – as opposed to ensnaring her – after learning she was a victim of abuse. Powell wondered what might have happened from there. Did Gary regret his decision to help her? What might their relationship have looked like?
When Powell moved to Los Angeles, he paid the bills by working on screenplays. But Hit Man – on which he and Linklater are credited for the screenwriting and journalist Skip Hollandsworth for the original story – is his first feature to make it across the finish line. He admires actors who have “these real writer sides” to them, listing George Clooney and Matt Damon as examples.
“You can be an actor for hire, and that is a worthy profession,” he says. “You don’t have to be at the keyboard. But I do think you have to be a fan of good writing – and to understand why you engage with good writing – to stay in the game. Otherwise, once you get on set, it’d just be luck.”
Though Everybody Wants Some!! and Set It Up put Powell on the map, his biggest movie to date is Top Gun: Maverick. In the long-awaited sequel – which was the second-highest-grossing film of 2022, raking in nearly $1.5 billion worldwide – he plays an arrogant Navy fighter pilot with the call sign Hangman, referencing his willingness to “leave you out to dry”.
Cruise’s character puts an end to all that, teaching the young folks how to support one another. Cruise shared a great deal of advice with Powell, who scribbled it down in the notebook he keeps full of wisdom from industry elders.
Powell learned early on to make the most of proximity to greatness. After Denzel Washington cast him in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, the then-teenager met Washington’s big-shot agent, Ed Limato, who helped discover stars such as Richard Gere and Kevin Costner. Limato urged Powell, then a freshman at the University of Texas, to move out to Los Angeles – which he took as gospel. (Powell notes that Limato, who went on to sign him, is also the one who discovered McConaughey, whom Powell later befriended through Linklater.)
He began the notebook on the set of the 2014 ensemble film The Expendables 3, when Sylvester Stallone, who co-wrote the screenplay, taught his co-star about how to adapt elements of older genres, such as westerns, for a modern audience. But it’s Cruise whose advice could fill chapters, Powell says, most of it gathered on the Top Gun: Maverick set. “There’s not one part about that movie that felt small,” Powell adds of the blockbuster production, but Cruise reminded the cast that “every frame in this movie is an emotional frame. It’s all about the story, and all has to be driven back there”.
Few understand the movie business the way Cruise does. He knows what people want from him and works overtime to deliver. At the European premiere of Twisters, which he attended in support of Powell, Cruise could even be seen showing him how to pose with popcorn.
Listening to Powell describe his approach to selecting projects, it’s clear which of Cruise’s lessons resonates most. (Hint: It isn’t the popcorn pose, which he didn’t quite master.) “It’s like, if I can keep audience trust over the course of my whole career, or if I can just continue to make good movies, then [I] keep getting to spin the roulette wheel,” he says.
Powell had wanted to be a part of Twisters since he learned that Joseph Kosinski, his director on Top Gun: Maverick, was developing the story. The actor brought a Cruise-like energy to the set. The first scene he shot was Tyler’s introduction, in which the character arrives in Oklahoma in a tricked-out pickup truck. He hoots and hollers and sticks his head out the window while yelling, “If you feel it …” to which a crowd of fans screams back the rest of the fictional YouTuber’s catchphrase, “Chase it!” Chung says he didn’t give the background actors any specific directions. They just responded to Powell’s energy. “And I knew we had a movie.”
Twisters, like the original, is ambitious in its use of special effects. At one point, Tyler and Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), the scientist who chases storms with him, drive into the eye of a tornado. And that’s when Cruise’s reminder comes to mind.
While working on the film, Powell shared a childhood story about witnessing a destructive tornado near his aunt’s house in East Texas. “He had this line where he said he didn’t know he was supposed to be scared until he looked at her,” Chung remembers. “And I put that into the movie … because our movie is so much about the emotion of fear, and what you do with fear.”
It’s the kind of relatable detail that cultivates the broadest audience but also serves the story. “That’s where I want to play,” Powell says. “Making a movie of that size for people to collectively experience in a theatre is the hardest thing to do … I watched Cruise nearly destroy himself trying to bring Top Gun: Maverick to life. I watched it every day, and I was like, ‘This is worth my time.’”
Earlier this year, Powell moved back to Austin after growing tired of Los Angeles. “It’s turned into a bit of a TikTok influencer town,” he says, “which for someone like me, right now, is kind of my biggest nightmare.” Living in Austin means he’s closer to family. Plus, he never finished his undergraduate degree in radio, television and film, which he would like to work on between projects, aiming to graduate in the spring.
Powell is the sort of guy to learn the rules so he can bend them. Most people wouldn’t skip town as their career begins to soar, but he seems determined to make it work. And why not, when even industry leaders are throwing spaghetti at the wall?
As we near the end of our time at Austin Studios, Powell mentions the advocacy work he has done to encourage Texas legislators to implement certain tax incentives as a way to lure productions to the state. (Last year, he appeared in a promotional video alongside other famous Texans such as McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid to urge residents to support the cause.) Even if Powell doesn’t end up emulating Redford as a marquee star, he just might as a determined businessman.
But as long as theatre marquees exist, and regardless of whether they remain a barometer for movie stardom, Powell will aim to grace them. Soon after we chat, he hops on a plane to South Africa to shoot the A24 revenge thriller Huntington. He has already been cast in Edgar Wright’s Paramount-backed take on Stephen King’s The Running Man and John Lee Hancock’s Netflix legal drama Monsanto and is co-creating Chad Powers, a Hulu comedy series about college football. J.J. Abrams is reportedly “eyeing” him to star in his next movie.
Then there’s that Broadway musical curveball. Powell is concocting the unnamed stage show with Ryan Murphy, who cast him in the satirical comedy series Scream Queens nearly a decade ago after getting to know him on the set of Glee. (Powell wasn’t in the musical TV series but used to hang around with his pal, cast member Chord Overstreet.) Murphy says the actor had star appeal back then – even co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Niecy Nash pulled their boss aside to ask, “Who is this? Where did you find him?” – and continues to surprise him. Without divulging specifics, Murphy notes that the musical was Powell’s idea. “That’s an interesting thing, that someone who’s done Top Gun would want to do a Broadway musical.”
Powell, ever the movie-biz theorist, says that’s exactly the point.
“I think where actors go wrong is they forget about their past. To give audiences the same flavour over and over and over is a bad thing. McConaughey gave me this advice. He says, ‘When they think you’re going to zig, you gotta zag.’”
Twisters is in NZ cinemas now
