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What can possibly stop the rise of Glen Powell? Over the past year, the 35-year-old actor has aced every test thrown at him. Playing aeronautical backup man to a monolithic Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick? Check. Resuscitating the commercial appeal of the romcom genre in Anyone But You, despite a terrible script and a chemistry-less co-star? Check. Oozing charm and range as the driving force of Hit Man, Netflix’s best original in years? Check. Now, playing a scene-stealing tornado-hunter in Twisters, Powell is the face of a film that enjoyed the biggest disaster movie opening of all time. Who said movie stars were a thing of the past?
It’s a testament, perhaps, to Powell’s indefatigable appeal that one of audiences’ biggest modern bugbears – the dreaded onscreen “age gap” – has gone almost entirely unmentioned in the wake of Twisters’ success. In the film, Powell is paired with Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays traumatised weather savant Kate Carter. At 26, Edgar-Jones is nearly a full decade younger than her co-star. Sydney Sweeney, who pursued a Powell-shaped romance in Anyone But You, is also nine years younger than him. (Adria Arjona, his mercurial match in Hit Man, is a more age-adjacent 32.) These age discrepancies are by no means taboo – it’s not like he’s taking roles where he’s wooing teenagers, or vaulting some kind of Bogart-and-Bacall generational chasm. But it’s also not nothing. Whether it’s a sign of our modern puritanical mindset, or simply a heightened vigilance to uneven power dynamics, it’s become entirely common for these sorts of older man/younger woman romances to be branded a bad look on screen. For Powell, though, everyone has more or less shrugged.
On the one hand, this may simply be a sign that everyone does not care so deeply about age gaps as they would have you believe. Or that the problem is often less about the age gap and more about the way it is dealt with on screen. (In both Anyone But You and Twisters, the issue is rather breezed over.) It may be, though, that there is something specific about Powell that makes people overlook. For some reason or another, the Top Gun: Maverick star has avoided being bracketed with his chronological contemporaries. Powell is, after all, the same age as Emma Stone and two years older than Jennifer Lawrence, two actors who feel like industry veterans at this point. But he is not discussed this way. In The Hollywood Reporter’s recent list of the “New A-List”, Powell was grouped alongside Aftersun’s Paul Mescal, Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega, and Zendaya as one of the 10 “young stars” taking the industry by storm. He is one of just two actors over 30 to make the cut, and the oldest entrant by three years.
Powell may not be young by Hollywood breakthrough standards, but he may be the next best thing – new. He is an actor who is currently having his moment: unless you were one of the few people who saw his early work with Richard Linklater (in 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!!), clocked his minor turn as John Glenn in Hidden Figures, or paid attention to his 2018 romcom breakthrough Set it Up (a far superior but lesser-seen effort than Anyone But You), he is an actor who seems to have sprung up overnight, fully formed. Don’t get me wrong: it’s good that stardom doesn’t close its doors to anyone old enough to remember what the 1990s were like. (It’s depressing, in fact, that breaking through at 35 is considered old – that the idea of jobbing actors becoming movie stars in middle age or beyond is an absurd rarity.)
Paradoxically, Powell’s age is at the core of his whole appeal; stood next to the boyish younger crop of leading man – your Timothée Chalamets, Jacob Elordis, or Harris Dickinsons – Powell seems like a proper, confident adult, a man of heft in an industry crying out for it. To some extent, he manages to walk in both worlds, approximating some of the rough, stubbly charisma of bygone stars such as Jack Nicholson, or a young Harrison Ford, while seeming at the same time quite harmless. Contemporaries such as Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, and Chris Pratt certainly don’t lack Powell’s cheesegrater abs and chiselled jawline, but they’ve nonetheless defined their screen personas by a kind of too-palatable sexlessness. Having shrewdly avoided the sort of edgeless superhero fare that has moulded these reputations, Powell has managed to make it big with his sex appeal intact – even as viral clips of him and his adopted puppy assure everyone that, no, he’s a sweetheart at his core.
Speaking to The Independent last month, Linklater described his four-time collaborator as "a natural born performer, a proper movie star, you know?” For years, Ryan Gosling has been Hollywood’s go-to star when it needs someone who can float between action and comedy; Powell, some eight years his junior, looks set to take his place.
In an interview earlier this year, Powell described going to an otherwise empty cinema to watch a six-hour video of Tom Cruise speaking directly to camera. It was a passing of the baton, of sorts, as the Mission: Impossible giant imparted everything he’s learnt about filmmaking across his four-decade career. It’s an invaluable mentorship, I’m sure, but Powell might not even need it. If Twisters has proved anything, it’s that audiences will still show up for the right movie star, everything else – age gaps included – be damned.
‘Twisters’ is out in cinemas now
