Glen Powell is everywhere. The 35-year-old Texas-born actor’s career skyrocketed this year with his starring role in Anyone But You alongside Sydney Sweeney, where a clever marketing campaign (combined with some helpful on-set romance rumours) saw the film bring in a whopping $219 million at the box office.
In an era where movie execs were pretty much unanimous on rom-coms being a dead format, or at least a financially unattractive one, Powell and Sweeney proved them wrong.
Then came Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a comedy hit that was snapped up by Netflix for £20m after its surprisingly warm reception at film festivals. And now he’s fronting Twisters, a certified blockbuster that’s currently looking like the high point of summer cinema.
You’ve probably seen him in other films too. He had a supporting role in another box office smash, Top Gun 2: Maverick, alongside Tom Cruise, Jon Hamm and Miles Teller, and he plays the romantic lead in that strangely enduring Netflix rom-com Set It Up, with Zoey Deutch.
Then there’s a bunch of films you may have seen but didn’t see him: getting his head smashed in by Bane as a “Trader #1” in The Dark Knight. Playing a boy with long fingers in Spy Kids 3. His turn as “Good looking frat guy” in Stuck in Love.
Powell has hustled hard for his newfound footing in Hollywood. So how did this dog-loving, business-minded bachelor go from being a frat boy in a world of ‘Robert Pattinson type’ casting calls, to the most in-demand man in Hollywood? Well, it all starts with some Girl Scout cookies.
A natural performer and a born hustler
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When Glen Powell was eight years old, growing up in Austin, he helped his sisters flog their Girl Scout cookies after a disappointing period of low sales. “He had us make signs that advertised ‘free gift with every purchase,’ and we put them up around the neighbourhood,” his sister Leslie told the New York Times. The gift? Well, that was Glen himself. “He would hide in some honeysuckle bushes and pop out after a purchase to perform Elvis songs,” Leslie recalled. “That’s my big brother. Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”
Born to an executive sports coach father and homemaker mother, Powell grew up part jock, part musical theatre kid. He performed with a Texas musical theatre company from fifth grade and learned to tap dance. But he also played sports, lacrosse and American football in particular. His second-grade project was on Steven Spielberg’s use of practical effects in Jurassic Park, and by 2003 he was making small appearances in films (remember the long fingered boy I mentioned in Spy Kids 3?).
When he was senior in high school (aka sixth form age), Powell landed a part in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington. He wore a tuxedo to his first table read, and impressed Washington so much that the veteran actor introduced young Powell to his agent, the legendary Ed Limato, who’s clients included Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Wynona Ryder, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Goldie Hawn, Steve Martin and Dennis Quaid. Limato put Powell on his roster. Everything looked like a straight shot to fame. All Powell had to do was get his college degree, then get to Los Angeles, and it would all be smooth sailing. And yet…
Hollywood’s ‘Twilight’ era keeps Powell on the side lines
A year passed, and Limato called Powell in his dorm room at the University of Texas, Austin. The year was 2008. He told Powell: “If you’re going to spin the wheel on an acting career, now is the time to do it.” So Powell dropped out of college and moved in with some family friends in LA.
Limato died two years later, leaving Powell without representation. He went through various agents, at one point even representing himself. “When you have no one championing you, you feel like you’re adrift,” Powell told GQ in an interview this May. One agency told him he would be “lucky to be cast as a dead body in a crime show,” and despite his acting friends getting cast in projects like Glee and Friday Night Lights, Powell just couldn’t land a big role.
He previously blamed this on the “Twilight era” of Hollywood at that time, with everyone everywhere looking for some version of Robert Pattinson. “I really do feel like a lot of Hollywood is which actors are in vogue,” Powell told GQ. “What everybody does is end up writing to that thing. All of a sudden, when Robert Pattinson pops off, they’re like, ‘We want a brooding Robert Pattinson type.’ You see it in every script.”
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Powell’s frat-esque energy did get him some parts, eventually: a recurring role in Scream Queens as an oversexed jock, a turn in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, and astronaut John Glenn in the 2016 hit Hidden Figures.
Then, suddenly, the tide turned. Leading men looked like Chris Pratt. They made jokes instead of intense eye contact. Christian Bale’s moody Batman moved over for Chris Hemsworth’s himbo Thor. Characters that screamed Glen Powell were suddenly all the rage. And the mean jock was in, too. Thus, the path was carved for Glen Powell’s portrayal of cocky Topgun graduate Lt. Hangman in Tom Cruise-led reboot, Top Gun: Maverick.
Top Gun and Tom Cruise film school
Although Powell originally auditioned for the part of Rooster, Miles Teller’s character, landing the smaller role of Hangman didn’t matter, because a) the film grossed a total of $1.4 billion and b) it introduced Powell to one of his heroes, Tom Cruise.
Cruise took Powell, a likeminded workaholic and diligent student of what he calls “Hollywood history”, under his wing. He helped Powell learn to fly a plane, took him on helicopter trips across London and enlisted him in the prestigious “Tom Cruise film school”. As it turns out, Tom Cruise film school was just Powell sat in a movie theatre watching a video of Cruise talk to the camera. For six hours.
“The funniest part is on flying,” Powell told GQ. “It was like he put together this entire flight school. So he would literally go ‘OK, this is what a plane is. Here’s how things fly. Here’s how air pressure works.”
In Top Gun: Maverick millions had seen Powell command a scene, and his ascent was about to get supercharged.
On-set romance rumours and a series of surprise smash hits
He was cast as the male lead in romcom Anyone But You, opposite Euphoria darling Sydney Sweeney, which thrilled Set It Up and Top Gun fans alike. Then, when off-screen romance rumours started swirling during the promotional period of his next film Anyone But You, things got a little bit much. ““At the time, [the rumours] were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out!” Powell told GQ. “I was going through a real breakup at the time. It was stressful.”
Luckily he had the support of Sweeney, a fellow overachiever with a marketing mindset and an extra year of hardiness built up in the industry. “She’s so in on the joke, man,” Powell recalled. “She’s a businesswoman, and she understands that who she is in the public eye and who she is in reality are two separate people. It’s Bruce Wayne and Batman. You can shoot Batman as many times as you want, it’s not gonna affect Bruce Wayne.”
It all helped towards Anyone But You’s surprise success. Another surprise came in the form of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, in which Powell plays a fake assassin and gets to flex his Jodie Comer-like reel of (sometimes good, sometimes purposefully bad) impressions. Initially dismissed by streamers, it was a hit at festivals, which led Netflix to pick up the streaming rights.
So what now? Everybody wants some of Glen Powell. But not everybody’s gonna get some.
Romcom lead turned action hero
Determined to lead a more Tom Cruise-esque career path than, say, a Robert Pattinson-esque one, Powell isn’t using his newfound fame to star in a string of small indie projects. His next role sees him become a bona fide action hero, hunting down tornadoes as storm-chasing social media star Tyler Owens in Twisters. He’s part of an impressive, up and coming cast, including Normal People’s Daisy Edgar Jones, Kiernan Shipka, Anthony Ramos, Daryl McCormack and Katy O’Brian.
The film, which is loosely based on the 1996 Helen Hunt-led action-adventure flick Twister, features “one of the most incredible action sequences of all time,” according to Powell, who appears to be getting into that gritty Tom Cruise state of doing his own stunts. “It’s a fully physical experience because the investment as an actor that you have to have is like, it can’t be delicate,” he said in an interview with Fandango’s Big Ticket.
He added: “It can’t be tender. Tornadoes aren’t tender. You have to put your body on the line in order to sell that experience.”
A move back to Texas and a quiet personal life
Powell is fully taking the bull by the horns when it comes to his career right now. “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.” His docket includes the A24 black comedy Huntington, alongside Margaret Qualley, and legal drama Monsanto, directed by The Blind Side’s John Lee Hancock and produced by Don’t Look Up’s Adam McKay, as well as multiple TV projects and a potential Top Gun 3.
If that doesn’t sound like enough, he’s also trying to finish college. “I think it’s really important to my mom and it’s more of an emotional thing for me,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Plus, I’m so close, I can taste it [...] I kept telling my friends I was going to throw the grad party of the century.”
As you might expect, Powell doesn’t have much space to date with a plate this full. “Dating me right now would be a nightmare,” he told The New York Times. “I basically have no free time.”
His main companion is his rescue dog, a terrier poodle mix called Brisket, which one interviewer said Powell “carries around [...] like Paris Hilton circa 2010.” Powell and Brisket live together in Texas, where he recently moved after becoming overwhelmed by Los Angeles. He told The Hollywood Reporter that the beauty of “getting to this point in Hollywood is that I can now leave Hollywood.” He added: “It’s like I’ve earned the ability to go back to my family.”
In his spare time, Powell enjoys watching the Texas Longhorns American football team and inhaling 40 ribs at the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas. He lives 30 minutes away from his family, even though he’s probably too busy to see them right now.
But that’s all part of the Glen Powell plan. As he told Interview magazine last month: “I do believe that there’s a natural breathing pattern to Hollywood where you give it all you got, you’re in everybody’s faces, and then you disappear for a hot minute and let them miss you, and then you come back. You have to buy into the longer journey. Trust in the decades-long career rather than the short and intense one.”
So buckle in for the Glen Powell journey. Because he’s only just getting started.
