The bromance between actors Glen Powell (1988) and Tom Cruise (1962) keeps the sensational press busy. Cruise asked Powell “personally” to sign in Top Gun: Maverick to play. Cruise appeared with a bowl of popcorn next to Powell at the premiere of Twisters! Cruise taught Powell how to run cinematically and how to “not die” during stunts for two hours The Running Manin theaters this week. If Cruise had the choice, Powell would play his most iconic leading role in the Mission Impossiblecopy sequence. Glen Powell: Tom Cruise’s heir.
Indeed, few actors are having more success in a post-pandemic Hollywood. After his breakthrough as an arrogant fighter pilot alongside Cruise Top Gun: Maverick Powell revitalized the romantic comedy (largely naked) in 2023 (Anyone but You), he played his first real leading role in action comedy Hit Manhe made Twisters to a surprisingly great financial success, as an arrogant, yet sympathetic tornado chaser.
Starting this week, Powell will play in his biggest challenge yet: The Running Man. Powell (1988) is one of the leaders of a new generation of film stars. Now that superheroes are out of fashion and the star quartet ‘the Chrisses’ (Pine, Pratt, Evans and Hemsworth) are becoming too wrinkled for Gen Z, it is the turn of a new group of thirty-somethings. And next to the refined (Timothée Chalamet), the smoldering (Michael B. Jordan) and the troubled (Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler), Powell is the funniest, most American guarantee for a popcorn evening.
Background macho
Powell already had Hollywood success as a teenager. After being noticed in youth theater in his hometown of Austin (Texas), he was cast as “boy with long fingers” in Spy Kids 3. Two years later he played a run over newspaper boy The Wendel Baker Story – he practiced with his mother in a parking lot. And in 2006, fellow Texan Richard Linklater cast (Boyhood) into him Fast Food Nation – the beginning of a close collaboration.
It was Denzel Washington who convinced him to “seriously try” acting after Powell’s film The Great Debaters (2007) played. Washington put him in touch with Ed Limato, a kingmaker in Hollywood, impresario of Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Kevin Costner. But two years later, Limato died of emphysema. And Powell ended up in freefall. His first agency fired him. He “was lucky if he got a role as a corpse in a crime show,” he was told.
It became something similar: background macho. Powell played lawyers, bad boyfriends, drug dealers: that suited his bully face and swimmer’s body. An arrogant Wall Street banker for whom no viewer mourns as Batman villain Bane The Dark Knight Rises grabs him by the neck. A walking punching bag by Sylvester Stallone in geriatric action The Expandables 3. He remained a diligent student; there are countless anecdotes about Powell asking his famous co-stars how to “make it” in Hollywood.
Maybe he needed those years: with some wrinkles he looked less student-like, rougher, more leading men. In 2015 he started to stand out. Initially in horror series Scream Queenswhere he shared a bed with Jamie Lee Curtis as a sex-addicted student – he was asked back for season two. And then into romantic comedy Set it Up (2018). Hollywood finally saw a star in him. Even if it was only after the pandemic, with Top Gun Maverickthat Glen Powell really became famous.
Richard Linklater understands best how to use Powell. They worked together four times, and for his first leading role, Hitman in 2024, they wrote the screenplay together. As a philosophy professor who helps the police by disguising himself as a hit man, Powell played all his talents: jolly comedy, romance and action – like Cruise, Powell does his own stunts. At his best, Powell cocky but quirky: arrogant, handsome in an annoying way, but approachable and jolly like an older brother. A cross between Jack Black and the type of barbecue hippie that Matthew McConaughey (also discovered by Linklater) often played.
Powell doesn’t want to be an actor so much as a star. “Actors who want to be serious are doing it wrong,” he said The New York Times. He understands that in modern Hollywood you also have to play outside the film in podcasts, interviews, TikToks. Before his death, impresario Ed Liman told him “over and over again” that a movie star is someone “with whom men want to have a beer – fun, non-threatening – and whom women want to date and introduce to their parents.”
That’s the man Powell is carrying on a promotional tour. He takes his handbag dog Brisket (breastpiece, Texan style) with him to interviews. Plops down on the couch with influencers as if he were their best friend. And understands how to go viral with a nude scene or a wild story. At podcast Therapuss he told me about the time his sister went on a Tinder date with a cannibal.
He comes across as authentic, even when we know it’s not real – because he’s completely unashamed of his self-promotion. Last year, for example, it emerged that he and Sydney Sweeney were publicly flirting and stoking rumors of an affair for their romantic comedy. Anyone but You to sell. It cost Powell his three-year relationship; ex Gigi Paris said the PR campaign “made her look crazy.” “In the end it came down to work coming first.”
Ben (Powell) and Elton (Michael Cera) are on the run in a house full of traps.
Photo Ross Ferguson
Redford
In a Trumpian Hollywood, Powell has momentum: down-to-earth, white, Southern and averse to intellectual pretensions. He takes every role that can make him the audience favorite. At least six projects are in the pipeline, reportedly including films from directors Barry Jenkins, Ron Howard, JJ Abrams and Judd Apatow. And a series version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidwith Powell in the Robert Redford role.
The Running Man is Powell’s biggest challenge yet. Can he make a $110 million remake of a cult film from the 1980s profitable? And can it really carry a film? Powell has his limitations. Jokingly slaughtering criminals? Naked rappelling from a hotel facade? Nobody does it better. But he also has to be “the angriest man on earth” in that film. That’s where he falls short: he remains the jolly father who tries to scold. The new Tom Cruise? Then you have to be more than jolly; can rage and cry.
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